I'll Still Love You
by Monica Moss
Summary: My brother is leaving me for some weird school, and I'm trying to keep him safe here from the potentially evil chimera-lady he went off with and much, much worse. I just wish he'd stop writing home about magic being real...
1. The Chimera-Lady Arrives

**This is a companion piece to Even If I'm Different Now, but both stories are meant to stand alone. While both fics are set in the same alternate universe, EIIDN follows Al's feelings of being abandoned, this one focuses on his brother back in Amestris. I'm not quite sure what possessed me to write this, but I'm going to do something I haven't in a while - start posting this without a complete draft while I'm still working on getting Good King Hohenheim ready.**

 **Anyways, thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy.**

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Part I

The Chimera-Lady Arrives

The first time I remember anything strange and unusual happening around Al, we were both very small. It was around the time the old man left us. He had walked out on us a few weeks before, and Al was starting to catch onto the fact that he would never come back.

We had an argument about if he'd come back, and I'd brought up a point that struck a chord with Al: if the old man was coming back, then why was Mom crying all the time? Al went quiet, tears forming in his eyes, and then the family picture that Mom had hanging in the living room fell off the wall, its glass breaking. This in itself wasn't so far out of the ordinary, but when we tried to put the picture back up for Mom, only she and us two boys were still in the picture.

There were a few other weird things that happened over the years too: things that happened around the fights Al and I used to get in; things that happened while we were running scared around Yock Island or from Teacher; and, most notably, the time Al rescued me from the rebounding human transmutation circle whose theory we'd worked so hard on. But I stopped thinking the weird incidents could be magic after Al and I started studying alchemy out of Hohenheim's books – or even just alchemic theory, in Al's case. Surely, they had to have an explanation, just like why Al could never actually perform alchemy.

Thus, I was skeptical and irritated when an old lady who could turn into a cat – some sort of chimera, I was sure – showed up wanting to take Al away to magic school. She was decent enough I guess to insist that she talk to an adult about it before dragging Al away, but I thought the school called Warty Hogs, or whatever its name was, was surely just a front to do something weird to the children who went there.

Then at the Rockbells' house, the chimera-lady insisted on demonstrating her so-called magic by turning the coffee table into a pig and stuff. Al at least tried to agree with me and my doubts at first, saying that she could be hiding a philosopher's stone somewhere.

Being in the days when Al and I were still looking for a philosopher's stone to get our bodies back to normal, I smirked and held out my hand to the chimera-lady. "Hand it over, you second-rate scam!"

She didn't hand me a philosopher's stone. What she handed over was that fancy stick she claimed was a magic wand. I proved to myself that the philosopher's stone wasn't hidden in the stick somewhere, perhaps in the thicker part at its handle by giving it a wave and having nothing happen although I'd had a transmutation in mind.

That just meant that the stone was on the chimera-lady herself, hidden somewhere in her emerald green robes, and I called her out on it as I handed her stick over to my brother.

But then, I heard words I hadn't expected: "Brother, I felt something."

I turned toward my brother, who was looking at the stick with something like awe on his face. I had to ask, just to be sure. "What did you say?"

"When I took this wand, I felt something." When Al looked up at me, I could tell he meant it.

Al felt something? I knew better than anyone that Al no longer had a body capable of sensation – I'd attached his soul to a suit of armor myself.

It had come much as a surprise to me when the armor started to transform after I put Al in it. Cold, gray metal had molded into warm, peachy flesh. It seemed for a single moment my salvation – I hadn't harmed my brother after all. That was before I'd heard his muffled cries. Though unconscious, my brother was shaking, his teeth biting his lip, his throat making sobbing sounds. All that was missing were the tears.

I knew there was something wrong with my brother. I tried to slap him awake, but no matter how hard my left hand hit his face, Al didn't react. Blood didn't even come to his face where he'd been slapped. And as I later found out, how could it? What housed my brother's soul looked like his own body, but it was still really that suit of armor that I'd put him in.

I remember faintly trying to drag Al out of the room, but the only thing I remember clearly is something he said after he woke up that really scared me: Al was scared, and he couldn't feel his body anymore.

And so now I dropped my jaw when Al said that he'd just felt something, just by touching the supposedly magical stick I'd handed him. Its owner, the chimera-lady who'd come to tell us my brother's a wizard and to take him away to magic school, couldn't possibly be right, could she?

A glance at Al's face revealed a smile, his eyes directed at me. What was that on his face? Hope, maybe? That he could feel again?

I dismissed any hopeful thoughts that I had about that – there couldn't be such a thing as magic in this world that first took away kids' mothers, and then their bodies when they stopped the world from taking their stupid brothers too. The so-called magic was simply a scam, the wand a device thought up by the con artists.

The wand looked real enough alright. It looked wooden, and it had felt the right weight for it too when it was in my gloved hand. What trick did the chimera-woman have up her sleeve?

Speaking of the devil, the chimera-woman prompted Al to go through the next step in her scam. "Well, aren't you going to give it a wave?"

Wave it Al did, but I didn't understand what happened: green. My clothes were green. It was a simple enough thing to dye clothes alchemically, but dying clothes without dye, without a transmutation circle or even touching the clothes was a different matter. And besides, my brother was incapable of performing alchemy, unless the stick made up for whatever was wrong with his Gate, but I didn't even want to think of the exchange for even dying fabric without anything.

"Al?"

My green clothing was a trick. It had to be. The chimera-lady must have transmuted my clothes when Al waved the stick. But the chimera-lady's lack of visible transmutation circles, the trick with Al's sensation earlier – why go through such great lengths to get my brother?

Al met my eyes. "Are you alright?"

And now I was the one Al was worried about. I looked away, just in time to see a jet of white light hit the pig that had once been our coffee table, making it a coffee table once again.

I made myself snap out of it. I had a younger brother to attend to, and he was letting out a sigh. "Al?"

Looking up from the newly-restored coffee table, Al shook his head. "It's nothing."

But I didn't buy that. Al didn't get like this over nothing. It must have been something to do with the so-called magic and the chimera-woman who wants him so badly to pull a stunt like this. Forming fists, I vowed to myself that I would not let her take him. "Al, do you...?"

Something warm patted my shoulder. It felt like Al's not-really-human hand. "I was reminded of alchemy for a moment when she did that," he said, "only, I could do something too. I thought I could become like you for a moment."

I thought vile thoughts about the chimera-woman. How dare she give my brother false hope like that.

I heard Al talking to the chimera-woman a moment later. He seemed to be dismissing her, sounding disappointed, but that meant he'd be safe.

However, Granny Pinako interfered. "What Al's trying to tell you," she said, "is that these boys need time to think things over. Come back tomorrow."

Traitor.

I remained as I was as the chimera-lady walked off. That is, until I heard a loud crack. Glancing at Al, I knew he'd run to check it out, and whatever it was, it would be part of the scam meant to take him away. I had to go investigate too.

When Al and I ran out the door, we found that the chimera-woman was gone. There wasn't even a complete set of footprints leading away in the muddy ground.

"Wow!"

Of course Al would say that. He was still young and impressionable – barely eleven! His few months traveling around with me on my military missions wouldn't have been enough to wisen him up to the ways of the world. I shot him a dirty look.

"Wow," he repeated, grin leaving his face. "Just wow. Quite an impression, huh?"

Growling under my breath, I ran up the stairs. I would find a way from keeping the dangerous chimera-woman from harming my brother. Somehow. I wouldn't let Al go.

I brainstormed ways to keep Al from falling into the chimera-lady's trap, but I didn't have any particularly good ideas by the time Granny came up to talk to me.

"What do you think the chances are that McGonagall actually has a stone like the one you've been off looking for?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense." If my voice was a little louder than it should have been, it was just because I was letting off steam. I wasn't actually mad at Granny for being fooled, even if she was a traitor who wanted to let the con artist come back to talk about taking Al away. "Scientific laws are laws for a reason: you can't break them."

Call it silly, but I folded my arms, resting my left hand on my unnaturally hard automail arm. If you tried to break the laws, you'd just end up paying – my automail was a private reminder of that little fact.

"Edward," Granny used the full version of my name, but she actually said it gently. The old lady came and sat next to me on the guest bed. "Please explain to me how turning my coffee table into a pig and back is scientifically possible."

"You can't break the laws," I repeated, "but you can get around them with other laws. For example, a philosopher's stone has properties that allow it to bypass the alchemic law of Equivalent Exchange – you can get something more out of the transmutation than you put in, and I'm sure you could rid your transmutation of unwanted excess materials as well. Like the table and the pig."

Granny chewed on the end of her pipe for a minute. "Then Al must have one as well."

"What are you talking about, you miniature hag?"

Granny scowled at me, but she didn't return the insult just yet. "Your family had a copy of the picture with Hohenheim in it once. One day, Hohenheim was simply gone. What happened to him?"

I scowled at the mention of my old man and looked down at the rumpled blue bedspread we were sitting on. "We can't prove that has anything to do with Al."

"Then what about that armor mimicking his real body, or any of the countless other weird things that have happened around him? Don't tell me it's someone else – the only thing consistent when anyone noticed things like this was Al."

I stood up and walked over to the dresser, which had an alchemy book on top of it. I picked up the book and looked at its front cover reverently: A Philosophy of Alchemy. "I don't know what's going on with Al," my voice trembled a bit, "but it's not magic. It can't be – magic is for frauds who are trying to hide what they're really after."

"And if it is real?"

I stood there, hand on the cover of my book, lips turning downward. There couldn't be such a thing as magic. Why entertain that possibility?

"Think of it this way," Granny said, "there is something going on with Alphonse, some sort of phenomenon. Even if you assigned it the term magic, it is still a phenomenon with an explanation, isn't it?"

If Granny was paying attention, she saw my body starting to shake as I let out a low growl and tightened my grip on the book.

"You're a scientist. Shouldn't you be trying to understand a new phenomenon instead of dismissing it? You're hurting your brother with your attitude, you know."

I didn't explode quite yet. See? I can be patient. Besides, I had to explain to her why to keep the chimera-lady away, for Al's sake.

Taking a deep breath, I said, "I'm trying to protect him from people like that woman. She told us that she was doing magic, but I know what she's doing has an explanation. I think it's a bad sign that she wouldn't give the explanation to us, so I don't want Al to go anywhere near her. She might rub off on him."

But Granny was too stupid to listen to reason. "I know you're worried about Al, but he's put a good head on his shoulders. He's already gotten a lot of experience thinking critically as an alchemical theorist. He can decide for himself how to think."

It only took one motion for me to spin around and send my book flying past Granny's head. Couldn't she see that Al was not thinking clearly about this magic thing?

Then she was shouting. "Are you trying to stop your brother from learning something he can actually do, you small-minded beansprout?"

I let the insults rip as I got revenge for the slight on my height. Granny had no right to call me short, the micro-grandma!

The two of us would have kept shouting at each other, but the bedroom door opened and there was Al, holding a book in his arms. Had he just heard us shouting, or had he heard something more? I didn't mean to offend him over the magic issue.

After I'd weakly greeted him, Granny greeted him with a more confident question: "Al, why don't you tell your brother how you really feel about magic?"

No matter what I'd sometimes said about Al when I was angry, I thought I knew that Al really was a good brother – a loyal friend who'd never betray me. Maybe in the coming years I'd feel as falsely betrayed as Al would feel falsely abandoned, but what Al said then was something that showed how loyal he really is to me and softened me up: "I'll stay here if Brother doesn't want me to go. I just came to get Brother's opinion on something, but I can see that you two are in the middle of something. Would you two please just stop arguing about me? I've already made up my mind about Professor McGonagall's offer."

Then Al left the room, holding his book tightly in his arms and keeping his head hung. I stood up, ready to go after him. "Al."

The guestroom door closed in front of me.

"Didn't it occur to you that no matter how you feel about the matter, Al might feel differently?" Granny asked. "You really could have handled things better."

Granny didn't need to tell me – I knew. I felt like scum for the look I'd seen on Al's face just then. I sat up for hours after Granny left, thinking. I did want to keep Al safe from the chimera-lady, but I didn't want to deny him the answer to why weird things kept happening around him either.

Speaking to my lap, I said, "If it's something he really can do, I guess I'll have to give him a chance."

Granny studied my posture. "Promise me you will."

I nodded, but I was still thinking of how to keep Al safe.

I slept on the problem all night, but I had no semblance of an answer until I took a look at Al's book before breakfast. I opened to the page he'd bookmarked and felt something squirm in my chest.

Al had been studying Gate theory last night. I supposed whatever was wrong with his Gate and whatever caused strange stuff to happen around him could be the same thing, and now it hit me exactly what the chimera-lady's words, fraudulent or not, had meant to him – not only could it possibly give him the answer to why he could never do the alchemy he loves, but maybe it could even give him an alternative method to do it, if that supposed teacher wasn't lying.

Perhaps if the chimera-lady was asking permission to take Al with her, and if she'd wanted to talk to an adult, she wasn't all that bad... I could only hope and be sure to keep regular contact with Al to watch for signs of trouble.

I went into the kitchen for breakfast and saw that Al really was mad at me about magic just by seeing all the milk and milk-flavored products he'd made. For once, I consumed them. I had to.

Luckily, Al's anger did evaporate with a surprised cry that I had drunk my milk. We were able to talk, him presenting me with a valid hypothesis of why he can't do alchemy based on our experience with the chimera-lady and her stick yesterday. "I was thinking about the thing that Professor McGonagall calls magic last night," he'd said. "Then I wondered if I can use her magic but not alchemy because I get a different power source than most people through my Gate? Like maybe my Gate's just aligned with a different power source than most other people's Gates. So I reviewed that book last night, and I think that could be the case, Brother, but what do you think?"

I gave Al some input on his hypothesis – it didn't quite explain everything the chimera-lady had done – and told I'd let him go to Warty Hogs, but I added one condition. "Just promise me you'll do your own thinking about what they teach? You're way too good at alchemical theory to let your mind be corrupted like that."

Al nodded. "I think I'll go try it out for a year. I'll miss you too, Brother."

We smiled at each other, but his smile was as fake as mine. I was letting Al go, but my protective instincts were still telling me not to. I couldn't bear to see him leave, so I mumbled out an excuse I made up on the spot. "I've got to call the colonel."

Then I actually did. "Al's leaving with the lady from your office – looks like she's a chimera. It looks like I'll be on my own from now on. Unless you have some background on her I can use to stop Al from going with her?"

Mustang's answer was not what I wanted to hear. "Minerva McGonagall is from another country. We only have international records for her, but I guess being a chimera is not an international crime or anything. She seemed responsible enough to me."

I made a fist out of my free hand. "She's taking my brother far away, and Al says he's going with her for a whole year. I just want to make sure he'll really be alright."

There was a sigh from the other side of the line. "This is going to be fairly difficult, but I guess I can have someone look into her background."

For once, I actually had a smile on my lips while dealing with my commanding officer. He would help me keep my brother safe, wouldn't he?

Before I could actually hang up, a stroke of inspiration hit me. "Hey, chimera research deals with biological alchemy, doesn't it? Maybe if I learned more about that sort of alchemy, I could figure out a way to get mine and Al's bodies back to normal. Is there somewhere I could go to learn more?"

"You could always try the library. I don't think the military has any experts in that field right now, but we are administering the entrance exam in a few months. Perhaps someone will show up to take it. I can look into it, but you'll owe me, got that?"

I frowned, but I really did need that information. "Yeah, yeah, I got it, but you'd better find me something good."

When I got off the phone, Al was gone. Granny and Winry said they'd seen him disappear into thin air with the chimera-lady.

It was doubtful that such a thing actually happened, but it sure felt like Al could disappear from my life as though into thin air.


	2. A Favor for Mustang

**The holiday season is always so busy, and I think I'm up to three projects I'm actively working on for writing alone (I also have music projects, photography projects, family commitments, newly started organ lessons, Christmas shopping, and just general everyday life to deal with). I know it's been longer than I've been taking lately to post anything, but please bear with the shortness of this chapter. I just had to cut it off where I did...**

 **Thanks for reading.**

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A Favor for Mustang

I took a nap on the couch while I was waiting for Al to get back from school shopping with that chimera-lady, if they were indeed returning. I just had to have hope that Al would come back alright, but I was uneasy in my sleep.

In my dreams, I saw Al holding the chimera-lady's wand again. Truth was standing between me and him, grinning that creepy grin of his. "You traded a leg for the ability to transmute without a circle. What shall I take from your brother for his trespasses?"

I stepped forward, reaching toward Truth. "Let him go. He can't even do alchemy!"

Truth's grin grew a fraction, and the Rockbells' living room was distorted into a swirling spiral of colors that faded into the white emptiness of the Gate. Before me, three floating symbols appeared – the symbols for mind, body and soul. And behind them, an all-too-familiar array appeared – the array I'd used when I tried to transmute Mom.

"No."

The array activated, and the symbol for body flew at me, latching onto my left leg and pulling it off. It came back to take the next part of my body, but someone, Al, jumped into the scene, shoving the body symbol away from me. He was taken instead.

I reached for Al, but the symbol pulled my right arm away from me and vanished, taking my limbs and Al's whole body with it.

The scene reset, only instead of my human transmutation array, I saw the chimera-lady's wand and my younger brother in a circle. The mind, body, and soul symbols appeared again, but the body symbol quickly faded away.

"I haven't taken your brother's body in the time strange and unusual things have been happening around him," Truth said, "but shall I take his mind or his soul?"

I reached for Truth's neck. "You can't."

Truth vanished, but the mind and soul symbols still rushed toward Al...

I woke up with a start. Looking around, I recognized the Rockbells' living room, looking much the same it had in my dream. I sat there stunned for a moment, still thinking about what scenes my mind had come up with, arms wrapped around myself.

If I was being perfectly honest, I was kind of spooked. Could something like that happen to Al, even though he can't do alchemy? I still had no idea what this so-called magic was, after all.

Shaking my head, I dismissed my thoughts. The dream was probably nothing. The only alchemical accident that Al would get into was the one he'd gotten into by pulling me out of the human transmutation circle.

I opened my pocket watch and stole a glimpse inside. I saw the reminder of the promise I'd made to return my brother and I to our original bodies, and I also saw that enough time had passed that Al should be back from his shopping trip, if the chimera-lady wasn't actually kidnapping him this time.

After smartening up a bit, I headed up to the Rockbells' guest room, where Al was engrossed in some book whose title was in a language I didn't recognize. A glimpse inside told me that the whole book was that way too, and there were weird illustrations there too of imaginary creatures and magic sticks. Looking around a bit, I saw a big cooking pot sitting in the corner, and a stick much like the chimera-lady's sitting on the nightstand, next to more books with foreign titles.

I picked up the top book and opened it up. It actually was in a foreign language. I set it down next to the rest of the books and peeked in the next one. Same foreign language. "Al," I asked, "why are all the books in another language?"

Al said something about a translation charm.

I frowned. The only thing I knew of that could suddenly give you a bunch of knowledge you'd never studied was the Gate.

Perhaps Al noticed my mood because he changed the topic, and it worked. After all, how could the so-called wizards' alchemy books not get my attention? If Al and I could squeeze a single secret out of them, maybe Al really could find a safe alternative way of accessing his Gate and be saved from people like the chimera-lady in the process. Their alchemy books would be the only ones I would consider trusting. "Anything good, Al?"

Al shrugged, explaining that he hadn't been able to buy any of them. But still, knowing that the so-called wizards had alchemy books available was a place to start, especially with Al going to their school to do research. Al told me that there was a possibility the two alchemies were different, but he was looking for an alternate technique to do alchemy, right? It could be a very good sign, but...

"Suddenly understanding a foreign language?" I scoffed. "Would that really make magic more believable, knowing that some alchemists experiment with the human brain? It's a con."

Al sighed and held up the book he was reading, whose title was as incomprehensible to me as when I'd first seen it minutes before. I remembered the glimpse I'd seen inside the book and highly doubted it was an alchemy book.

"I don't think whatever Professor McGonagall did was alchemy," Al said, "she only had that stick. I don't know what's up with me and English, but if I can find any wizards' materials that can help me with my research, it's this book. I don't just trust what the wizards are saying either, but I do want to know what they're saying. I'm taking notes on this book, Brother. Will you look them over with me?"

I turned to head out the door. "Al, I don't care what the scams are saying about the power they're using. But you should do your own research."

I left the room in a foul mood. What was the price for Al's apparent abilities? It wasn't actually his mind or soul, was it?

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My foul mood hung around the next day as well, and a phone call from Colonel Useless did nothing to help it either. At least he'd been able to confirm that the chimera-lady did work for some kind of private school in the British Isles.

I know I owed him a favor for checking into that chimera-lady's background, but couldn't he at least have waited until I'd said goodbye to my younger brother before making me go check anything out?

The day after Al's shopping trip, with just a few more days to spend with Al before he was taken from me, I got stuck sitting alone on a train, headed out to some town in West named Toadsfield to look into rumors of some sort of transmutable illness that turned people into rabid wolf-chimeras. Well, with a name like Toadsfield, I had all sorts of fantasies during the ride about finding some more of the chimera-lady's witches and wizards there and finding a way to prove to Al that they were frauds – maybe with some sort of clue about their strange alchemy as well.

That picture cheered me up a bit, but my bad mood returned when I showed up at the first eyewitness' house. It was some round-bellied man with a bright red beard. I held up my silver pocket watch and said that I was there about the chimeras, but he just glared at me.

"What chimeras?" he asked.

I tilted my head to one side. "Aren't you Archibald Edison?"

The round-bellied man's grip tightened on his doorknob. "What does the military want with me?"

"You reported an illness that turns people into wolf-chimeras?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, kid. Now scram." The round-bellied man threw the door closed with enough force to rattle it on its hinges, and I was left glaring at the door.

I grumbled about that man who'd reported chimeras to the military only to be so uncooperative when we showed up all the way to the next address Mustang gave me. This time, a muscular woman opened the door, but she told me almost as nicely as the round-bellied man that she's never heard of the chimeras she reported either. All eyewitnesses did actually, except for the family of a little boy everyone had reported as a victim.

The family lived in a nice house near the edge of town, right by some thick woods.

"Good," I'd muttered to myself as I approached the house, "I'm sure whatever's going on here, they'll want me to help catch whoever turned their son into a chimera."

The boy's mother answered the door, a scrawny lady with brown locks as curly and as greasy as the springs in my automail. I did feel sorry for her, mind you, but I couldn't bring myself to smile in my foul mood either. I did my best to wipe a scowl off my face as I held up the proof that I'm a dog of the military and said, "I'm here about the chimera-illness."

Her face lost a bit of its color. "I don't know what the military's heard, but my son is not a chimera."

"I'm not here to do anything to your son! I'm just supposed to figure out what's going on and put a stop to it. My commanding officer, Roy Mustang, said that your husband's an old friend of his and wanted someone out here to investigate, someone who wouldn't take your son away?"

The spring-headed woman smiled, but it looked rather fake to me. "Jasper called Roy to do something about the reports, I see. Why don't you come in?"

She led me into a cramped living room with narrow, high-backed furniture to match the small room with a tall ceiling. "I should offer you a drink. Not wine. Milk maybe?"

"Not milk!"

My outburst seemed to go completely unheard by the spring-headed woman. "You do drink milk, right? Oh, silly me, of course you do." She chuckled dryly. "I'll just go get that for you. Hope you don't mind a bit of a wait – there are some experts who have taken a look at our son. I'll just contact them and let them know someone's here to investigate."

The woman had been wringing her hands the entire time she spoke, not even looking at me. "Hey!" I repeated the word until I finally got her attention. "You don't have to be so nervous. I'm not here to take your son away, and besides, I'm just a kid. You don't even have to offer me anything to drink, but if there are experts you could call, that would be alright."

Her fake smile was back. "Well then, I'll just go get in touch with them. Please, make yourself comfortable."

I flopped down on a red velvet-covered armchair that had looked soft but was as stiff as cardboard. Looking up at the ceiling, I started tracing arrays on it with my eyes until I noticed a handful of rather sudden arrivals.

Two men and one woman wearing brightly-colored robes had appeared in the already too-small living room. Wizards. And what was more, each of them had one of their supposedly magical sticks out and pointed at me.


	3. Werewolves and Stick-Wielders

Werewolves and Stick-Wielders

"Great. More _wizards_?" I crossed my arms. "What do you want?" I glared at the stick-wielders, but none of them so much as flinched.

"Calm down, kid," said one of the men, a stout albino in a lime green eyesore. "We're not going to harm you."

"I'm supposed to believe that? Just like I'm supposed to believe that chimera-woman when she says my brother's going to that completely legit Warty-Hogs school."

The wizards exchanged looks. "A relative?"

"It is the law," said the woman. "We can't touch this one."

"I'm right here, you know," I said as the three new arrivals lowered their sticks. I got out of the uncomfortable armchair I'd been slouching in, observing the wizards for any further signs of hostility or something. I'm not even sure what they'd try, but I certainly didn't trust them.

The third wizard, an average-sized man with a thin mustache, bent down to my level. "What is a little kid like you doing investigating here anyway? You seem way too young to be with the police."

Eyebrow twitching, (how dare he call me little?), I held up my pocket watch. "I was ordered to find out the truth about the wolf-chimera out here and take care of the alchemist responsible."

The stick-wielders gazed at my watch. I could swear I saw them frown for a moment, but they schooled their expressions pretty quickly. "Our apologies," said the albino, "we didn't expect State Alchemists to be as young as you are. What have you found anyway?"

I said, "I found a bunch of stick-waving weirdos who think they can silence rabid wolf-chimeras and take younger brothers and get away with it." Or at least that's what I wanted to say. Instead, I sent them my dirtiest look. "You tell me what's going on here."

"Werewolves."

The one word was enough to make me roll my eyes. That's what I got for asking so-called wizards. "They're chimeras." I smirked. "I thought it was going to be a lot harder to find whoever intimidated the locals into silence, but here you are. I bet you're the ones who've been making the chimeras too."

"Alchemists!" The mustached man turned to the woman in his group. "Are you sure we can't Obliviate him? These people are always so much trouble for us."

"His younger brother is a wizard." The wand-wielding woman crossed her arms at her companion, scarlet sleeves riding up a bit.

I kept an ear on their conversation, but I was trying to figure out what the mustached guy had meant by _Obliviate_. They needed a way to keep me quiet, like they'd done to the rest of the town. What was that code for?

The disagreement between the mustached man and the one woman started to become a three-way argument between all the stick-wielders. I caught something about Amestrian wizards' competition with alchemists and something about us not even noticing that the Fuhrer's not even human. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

My mind reeled and backed up. The Fuhrer's not human?

I paused near my door. I had been making my way outside while the stick-wielders were arguing, but I stopped to see if I could hear any more about the Fuhrer. No, the woman was again telling the mustached man that they can't legally Obliviate me.

It was a good time to get out of there. I slipped through the front door and ran down the path, spinning around the corner at the gate of the family's walled-off yard. I went off toward the forest beyond the town's boundaries – if I was here anyway, I might as well get the evidence I need to convince Al these people might not be safe, right?

Not so far inside the woods, I heard a twig snap and spun around to face whoever it was, falling into one of the defensive positions Teacher had taught Al and I in our martial arts training. It was just a little boy. If I had to guess his age, I'd say he was somewhere around six.

I relaxed and took a step toward the little boy.

Now, it was later in the day, but it was August, so the sun hadn't set yet when I got out to the woods. I could see the small bags that had formed under the brunette boy's eyes, eyes that were yellow, sort of like mine, expect where mine are bright and intense, his were dull and rather sick-looking. "Go home. It's dangerous here."

The boy flinched and stepped back as though he were expecting me to hit him.

I sighed. "What are you doing out here, kid?"

"I'm Brian," the kid mumbled, "Brian Warner."

He said it like it explained everything, and it actually did explain a lot. My eyes drifted back toward the house I'd just left. The Warners. Their little boy was a victim, what the wand-wielders had called a werewolf.

Maybe I could get him to tell me what happened. I sat down in a half kneeling, half crisscrossed position. "It's alright. I'm with the military. I came to get the ones who made you a wolf. It was the ones with the sticks, wasn't it?"

"No. I got bitten by a werewolf." The boy gazed at me. He was the first one in town to tell me anything without a trace of hostility or nervousness.

I couldn't deny that he thought he'd been bitten by a werewolf.

"Then what are the stick-people doing here?"

According to Brian, he'd been bitten by a large canine months before, and the town thought he'd been bitten by a rabid wolf until he transformed that first full moon and had to be locked up to not hurt anyone. The so-called wizards hadn't shown up until after the town had contacted the military, after someone had noticed that Brian only transformed at full moon and started the rumor that the boy's a werewolf. The stick-wielders had made everyone but Brian and his parents forget. (Was that what the stick-wielders had meant by _Obliviate_? Obliviate, make oblivious.) The stick-wielders had also given the family instructions to keep everyone else safe from Brian.

I found it fishy. I didn't doubt that Brian believed what he told me, but what were the stick-wielders really doing in Toadsfield? If Brian couldn't control his transformations, what triggered them? It couldn't be the full moon – too many similar conditions would trigger it. And why did the stick-wielders have to erase everyone's memories? Couldn't they just show them that Brian's condition had a scientific explanation?

I stood up, inwardly groaning. I wasn't going to be able to get that evidence for Al until full moon, when it was too late. I couldn't wait around for the moon phase to go from last quarter to full – I had to get back to my brother. I'd just have to return to Toadsfield weeks later.

I trudged to the train station to buy a ticket for the last train back to Risembool and used a public phone to call Colonel Useless while I was waiting. I mentioned the alchemist cult members calling themselves wizards, Obliviation, and the controlled timing of the rabid wolf-chimeras' shape-shifting. I begged him to look further into the chimera-lady's background – I didn't really want Al to go off to some cult's school, not that I could stop him if he chose to go.

* * *

I couldn't talk Al out of going. All I could do was hope he'd be safe and that Equivalent Exchange didn't take his mind or his soul.

He was packed by the night before the chimera-lady would come pick him up and take him to the train station in England. Well, Al was used to travel, and he didn't need much stuff as a suit of armor – just his school supplies and a few reminders of home. He asked Granny Pinako to send him with a few pictures of our family.

It was sentimental and mushy, but I had no room to blame him. Not with what I'd carved into my pocket watch, not that I'd ever show that to Al. I stood by the window in the Rockbell's guest room early in the evening before Al left, holding my watch in my left hand and letting it reflect sunlight around the room as I stared at it.

Soon after, I met up with Al to talk over his plans for research with him: look into the stick-wielders' alchemy, and if that yields no explanation, then start with some primary research, taking advantage of the large gathering of wizards at the school.

With the details for Al's long-term plans for his research, the project was sound enough, but...

"Will you really be alright?" I asked him.

Al looked at me. "What's this about?"

I looked to the side, thinking of just the right words to use. Even my twelve-year-old self had enough sense to at least try to be tactful on this particular subject around Al. "It's just that wizards think so differently than we do."

"Of course they think differently – they use a different technique!" Al put his warm, seemingly-human arms around my shoulders. "I'll still be an alchemist. I'll just be exposed to the ideas I need to maybe even do something with it beyond theory." He pulled away and smiled at me. "I'm going to a school – they should teach me how to improve my methods and my mind for alchemy."

He was right – Warty-hogs was still a school, run by the stick-wielders or not. Al should still be able to learn something there, and if he could continually improve his mind, then maybe it wouldn't be quite as devastating of a price even if bits of his mind were what would be taken for the alternative alchemy. I relaxed.

I was able to sleep well that night too. Well, I didn't have any nightmares about Al paying the price for his _magic_ at least.

* * *

The next morning, we gathered in the Rockbells' living room to say goodbye to Al. The clear sunlight streaming through the windows didn't really reflect my mood, but it did Al's – he was the one who had more hope about the possible scams that were the stick-wielders.

The chimera-lady came, perfectly at the time she said she would. And when she came, Al said his goodbyes. He hugged Granny and Winry, and he hugged me too. As Al was hugging me he promised, "I'll keep you up-to-date on my research."

While he was doing this, the chimera-lady was pulling out a rather ugly goblet out from a bag too small to hold it. I didn't know how she'd done that, but I knew that supposedly the goblet would take them to the train station in London.

Al picked up his things and walked over to the chimera-lady. He reached out to touch it, but there were some responsibilities I really had to remind the chimera-lady that she had toward my little brother. As his educator, you know?

"Wait!" I pointed directly at the chimera-lady. "You had better keep my little brother safe. You had better make sure your school gives him a chance to sharpen his mind. Or you won't be forgiven."

She met my eyes and gave some assurances about that Warty-Hogs school. She wouldn't look away, so I ended up breaking eye contact, giving her a quick nod and scowling.

I was much more interested in what Al had to say anyway.

"I'll be fine," he said. "I'll keep in touch. I promise."

"Yeah." And what Al said was actually much more reassuring than anything the chimera-lady could have said.

Al reached out to touch the goblet in the chimera-lady's hand, and the two of them left quickly. It looked as though they'd been sucked into the ugly goblet, which itself disappeared from existence.

I ran to the spot on the floorboards that Al had vanished from and inspected it. There was no trace of anything.

"Al..." I don't even know what I'd been trying to say, but I ended up choking on some air as I sunk to my knees.

Granny and Winry came over to me and gave me a hand up. I was somewhat aware of the circles someone was rubbing on my back. "He'll be fine. You'll see."

* * *

The train ride back to East City to report to Colonel Useless was empty and long. I was preoccupied by thoughts of wizards and werewolves and my brother.

I asked Colonel Useless if he'd found out anything else about the chimera-lady or her Warty-hogs school since I'd called from Toadsfield, but it seemed he'd been much more interested looking into a possible Amestrian branch of her type of scams, their ability to mess with people's minds, and whether or not the Fuhrer actually was human. He hadn't even found anything solid about those either.

Thinking vulgar thoughts about the guy, I went about my usual duties and hoped to myself that looking into chimeras would give me something useful, either to save Al from scams or to get him and me our bodies back. Something really bothered me about that school...

* * *

I got a letter from Al once I'd returned to Toadsfield for the full moon, and the letter's method of delivery did nothing to put me at ease. I'd arrived in town a day early and was settling into my hotel room for the night.

I sat on the room's single bed, reading an introductory book on chimera theory. Now, I normally tune everything else out while I'm reading, but I was able to hear a disturbingly loud hoot coming from outside my room. I put my book down to investigate and found an owl begging to be let in.

Grumbling, I went to close the curtains on the stupid bird, but it hooted again and started tapping on the window with its beak.

There were many marks on the glass, as though the owl had been tapping for a while before it hooted. I was just going to ignore the owl anyway, but I spotted something white tied to its leg that attracted my curiosity.

"Now, listen, bird," I said as I opened the window. "There aren't any pets allowed, so if you leave any signs of being here, I'll put your insides on your outside for you. Got it?" I showed it my automail fist to make a point. The owl simply offered me the leg to which was tied an envelope addressed _Brother_.

I blinked and removed the letter. Inside, among other things, was mention of some sort of creature with the ability to affect the mind – aptly called _Dementors_. The whole of stick-wielding culture was pretty demented if you asked me.

What was their plan anyway – to make new students lose their minds so quickly by attacking them on the train? Al said something about the Dementors being a security measure, but that sounded too dangerous to simply be part of school security.

Luckily, judging by the rest of Al's letter, his mind was still fine and his research plans intact. Al had even started locating resources.

The owl was still hanging around when I finished Al's letter.

"What do you want?" I asked it.

It held out its leg again.

"Do you want me to send a letter back to Al?"

The owl hooted softly.

"Alright! I wanted to keep in touch with him anyway." I looked around for something to write a letter with and eventually settled on the pad of paper by the room phone.

I sat down with it. "I must be crazy, talking to a bird. Gack. The stick-wielders' weirdness must be rubbing off on me, and I'm not even the one attending their school."

I didn't think on this long because I did have a short note to write to my brother.

 _Al,_

 _Glad to hear about the library. Be careful of the Dementors and anything like them. Keep your mind in good shape._

 _I'm on an interesting mission right now. If I learn anything important, I'll tell you about it later._

 _Ed._

* * *

The next night I found myself panting, running from a rabid chimera-wolf pup that had bitten me. Luckily, Brian had gotten the wrong leg and I was able to kick him off.

Even if the chimera thing was a transmutable disease, it shouldn't be possible to get it from your automail being bitten, right? As I later learned, I was even luckier than I thought that I didn't get lycanthropy: it is a bone fide disease, untreatable, ostracized, and subject to the stick-wielders' laws.

I glanced up at the bright moon. "I don't get it. I scouted the woods out beforehand, and there weren't even any stick-wielders around. What triggered the kids' transformation?"

I didn't have a lot of time to think about that just yet – the rabid wolf-chimera pup was still after me. With an extra surge of adrenaline, I picked up my pace and climbed up a tree to wait for Brian to retreat.

I actually had to cling to the trunk from the shaky upper branches the rest of the night, tightening my grip whenever Brian went at the tree. Wasn't there anything more interesting to hunt in the entire stinking forest?

There went my chances for getting any sleep.

I'd nearly fallen at least three times before the sun finally rose and Brian turned back into his human form. At that point, I shakily shimmied down the tree trunk and checked on the ragged little boy at the base of the trunk.

Looking him over, I found nothing. The transformation had no trigger I could find.

"Hey," I asked. "Are you okay?"

Brian's face was scrunched up, almost in tears. "Mister, did I hurt you?"

I forced a grin: he hadn't hurt me, but I'd gotten quite a few scrapes and bruises trying to avoid his teeth and claws. Not to mention, I'd soon have a goose egg on my forehead from Winry wrenching me over the slightly damaged automail. "Nah. Don't worry about it – you just scared me. Besides, I was the one stupid enough to insist on coming along, right?"

As much as I hated to admit it, it looked like the stick-wielders might not have had anything to do with his one. Nothing to do now but trace back the trail of infected people back to whoever had made the first of these rabid wolf-chimeras.


	4. My Trips to Central

My Trips to Central

I scowled even deeper than usual as I grumped into the colonel's office. "It really was some sort of infectious disease. All I got was that it was some creep that even the stick-wielders don't like who conveniently left the country after he bit Brian."

Colonel Useless just looked at me. "Fullmetal, what are you talking about?"

Crossing my arms, I glared at him. "Those rabid wolf-chimeras out in Toadsfield that you sent me to look into. I checked them out and they really are made by some sort of infectious disease made by the alternative alchemy that those stick-waving people who took my little brother to their school do."

The colonel frowned. "What rabid wolf-chimeras?"

"You know, like the type your friend's son..." I trailed off, staring wide-eyed at the wet match. "They touched your memories."

Colonel Useless got off his butt, out of his chair. He came to stand in front of me. "Fullmetal, explain."

It was kind of odd having the colonel not know everything I got up to on my missions whether I reported it or not, but I had to admit that I might need help with this, so I told him what I knew. I mentioned the wand-wielders' alternative to alchemy and what they could do to people's memories. I told him about my mission to Toadsfield and the school they'd taken my brother off to.

"Have you heard from your brother since?"

I nodded. "Yeah. He told me about getting to the school. I'm really worried about him." I raised my gaze to meet the colonel's eyes with his freakishly-tall height. "I'd still like to get Al his body back, but this is more urgent."

The colonel grabbed a pen and notepad from his desk and started writing something I couldn't see. "Those are pretty big claims you're making. I'd like to check this out for myself, but if there really is a group competing with alchemists that's capable of erasing memories, that's worrying. If something happens to my memories again, tell me to check my alchemy notes."

I nodded. Maybe Colonel Useless could have good ideas, even if just once in a blue moon.

"By the way," he said. "Any ideas why they let you keep your memories?"

"Some legal stuff about me being related to Al."

The colonel was quiet for a moment. "All the same, it couldn't hurt for you to put what you know in your alchemy notes. Keep me updated. You're dismissed."

I stood where I was. "By the way, do you still remember what you said about keeping an eye out for chimera specialists? I mean, State Alchemy exams are next month."

"It's a lead on getting your bodies back. I remember – I've volunteered to go to Central to help with the exams. Now back to work, shrimp."

I yelled at the rotten colonel for his unfair quip at my height, but I did feel better knowing he remembered his end of the bargain, or at least the part he hadn't done already. I took his advice and wrote everything I knew about Al and the wand-wielders later too, just in case.

The next month was business as usual. The only encounters I had with any wand-wielder took the form of my brother's letters, which came as evidence that wizarding alchemy is different from our alchemy and as complaints that his scientific mind was making him unpopular among all the other wand-wielders' brainwashing victims.

I felt the first prick of betrayal, however briefly it lasted. How could Al even consider giving up all we believe in just to fit in? Sure there was a chance that using the wand-wielders' technique could cost him his mind, but he didn't have to give in so easily, did he?

I wrote something back to encourage him to remain the scientist he'd always wanted to be and pushed the problem to my mind's back burner, but it kept resurfacing in my sleep throughout September as I did routine research, investigations, police support, and paperwork for the military. I didn't get any reassurance at all about Al until an owl arrived with a package of fireworks and a note about the older students who'd applied what they'd learned about "magical" theory to create them.

The note made sense and the detailed pictures the fireworks made were kind of cool, but I forgot all about them before I had a chance to reply to Al: October had begun, and the State Alchemy exams made them slip my mind.

My own yearly evaluation was a cinch, but there were other, horrible events.

Colonel Useless honored his agreement to look out for chimera specialists, and he found a new State Alchemist that matched what I was looking for: the Sewing-Life Alchemist, Shou Tucker. "He brought a talking chimera in for his demonstration."

I stood up straighter, pressing the phone to my ear. Talking chimeras had sounded cool at the time.

"Did it really speak?"

"We could only get it to say one word, but yes. From the way that I hear it's been acting, the chimera seems like it actually knew what it said and wasn't just parroting human speech."

If my eyes ever shone at the prospect of chimeras, it was at that moment. "Cool!"

The colonel leaned over his desk. "It said that it wants to die, and it hasn't been eating. Still, to be able to create such a creature at all demonstrates a leader in biochemical alchemy. Tucker may be able to help you get your bodies back to normal."

That afternoon, I caught a train to Central, where I met Tucker, his half-starved chimera, and his two-year-old girl. I got a chance to examine his chimera for myself – it appeared to be part dog, and part something I couldn't identify. The chimera was a large brown animal that looked at me with dull green eyes.

I patted its furry back. "Hang in there. Life's worth it."

I didn't expect the two-year-old, Nina, to have eyes just as sad as the chimera's. "What's with her?"

Tucker gave me a sheepish smile. "I'm afraid Nina's having a tough time. Her mother left us because of financial issues. My daughter misses her mother, and I don't think our plans to move are helping things any."

I looked at Tucker's chimera, lying listlessly in the corner of his apartment's small living room. "I don't know how well your wife expected you to do, but you got the state certification and the money that comes with it. Couldn't your wife had stayed just a little longer to see things through?"

"I can't say I know how women's minds work."

I couldn't say that either, but a bit later, I was studying from the materials that Tucker had managed to gather on his own when I was interrupted by his little girl. Nina stole my book and ran to hide, saying she wouldn't give it back until I played with her.

I easily found her hiding next to the thin chimera behind a chair in the living room. "I found you, now give me the book back!"

Nina squealed and curled up against the chimera's front, the chimera returning her affection with its head. The little girl looked at me with eyes a shade that matched the chimera's, and then it clicked.

"Nina, how long has your dad had this chimera?"

Now, Nina was only two years old and didn't have a great sense of time, but I did get that the time her mother supposedly left around the time the chimera appeared.

I'm not proud of what I did after that, and I didn't even mention the incident to anyone outside the military, not even Al, for months afterward. I didn't tell him a thing about it until after I'd met Doctor Marco when I was taking Nina to live with her relatives and taken over a month deciphering his research – a task that I'm sure would have been much easier if I had more experience as a State Alchemist or my brilliant alchemical theorist of a brother to help me.

 _Dear Al,_ I started, thinking through the best way to break the news about philosopher's stones to my brother, who was off studying with the wand-wielders. Seeing as how alchemists were not always the most ethical of people either, I decided to say that I'd at least wanted to go with Al to the place where he got his foreign-language books, even if I needed to warn him to be careful with his so-called magic in this same letter. What I said about Colonel Useless giving me a mission back then and subsequently introducing me to the Sewing-Life Alchemist was close enough to the truth, right?

I told my brother about things primarily because I needed to apologize for not being able to get his body back using a philosopher's stone, like we'd wanted. I told him about the Tuckers and meeting Doctor Marco when I'd escorted Nina to her relatives in the east.

Watching the owl go off, I felt hope about Al for the first time in months, even if I was disgusted by all the dark secrets I'd learned lately. Maybe something I'd said would help him figure out what the exchange was for his technique, whether it really was minds or souls or something, and he'd finally come home.

That didn't mean I wasn't worried about whatever magic had already cost him.

My letter sent to Al, I turned in for the night.

Of course, the truth behind philosopher's stones is a big secret for someone my age to know, so I was distracted at work after cracking Marco's code, even more so than I would have been distracted and discouraged after learning about Mrs. Tucker if I hadn't found a lead on getting Al's body back so quickly. Still, I didn't even remember all of what Marco said until I half-heard someone talking about truth and the military.

But I did remember. I'd been getting on the train, a cool autumn breeze playing with my hair and my jacket, when Doctor Marco came panting up to me. "Wait!" he called.

The doctor handed me a piece of paper with a library call number. "I think that you have a shot at finding out the truth behind the truth."

The truth behind the truth... The truth and the military... Come to think of it, the military had access to Doctor Marco's research on philosopher's stones for years. What had they been doing with it? I tuned into the conversation Havoc was having with Breda.

"...why we had to wipe them out."

"It's not like either side gained anything from that war, and now we just have another riot on our hands. Who could have benefited?"

I interrupted. "What are we talking about?"

Breda rolled his eyes, but Havoc was nice enough to fill me in. "Central's having trouble with the Ishvalan population in its slums. Something about not being able to get food."

"I heard the words _truth_ and _the military_. What was that all about?"

Breda shrugged. "We were just wondering about the truth behind that war. All that fighting never made much sense, especially after Ishvalan leaders tried to surrender."

"Oh. Say, around Ishval's when a lot of State Alchemists quit, right? I think... someone I met... said something about it."

"Yeah." Havoc lazily turned his head toward me. "What of it?"

I'd gotten what I needed. I jumped to my feet.

"Hey, little chief, where are you going?"

I stopped just long enough to grin back at Colonel Useless' other underlings and grin. "I'm just going to talk to the colonel about another trip I've got to take to Central." Then I burst into the colonel's office and ran and slammed my hands down on his desk.

"Fullmetal..." he said.

"I told you about philosopher's stones, right?"

Whatever the colonel was about to say, he seemed to think better of it. "Did you find something else?"

"The military had to do something with that research, right? I think Doctor Marco gave me a hint to look into its involvement, back in Central. So you've gotta let me go back."

The colonel nodded. "Well, I suppose I can't blame you for your _small_ oversight, all things considered."

"Who are you calling a beansprout so small that he can't see things that would dangle in front of normal people's noses because they're so high above his head?"

The jerk smirked. "I didn't say any of that. Anyway, I happen to be very interested in anything you'd find, so I'll let your slip-up slide, but I can't let you investigate this by yourself. You'll need someone to watch your back in case anything turns sour."

"So what? You're not going to let me go? I need to act on this as soon as possible."

Colonel Useless held up a hand. "You'll be buying a ticket back to Central for today, but you're going to have to stick around here until there's someone to meet you. I just so happen to have a friend of mine posted in Central."

I glared at the colonel and pouted the whole time that he was on the phone with someone called Hughes.

* * *

I hate feeling small, and that was exactly how I felt when I got off the train at Central. It wasn't exactly my first time to the large city, but it was my first time meeting Major Armstrong.

The major was actually the same size Al would have been in his armor if it hadn't somehow ended up imitating his real body. His bulk emphasized the fact that I'm... still growing and haven't reached my full height yet.

Armstrong introduced me to two other soldiers he had with him – Maria Ross and Denny Brosh. Soon afterward, the four of us went to a bookstore for some maps.

Did I ever mention how much I love Central? Even this bookstore had so many more books than I'd ever seen in Risembool. Several shelves were devoted to each section, like the travel section, where we headed for maps.

We found maps. Maps of Amestris. Maps of Central. Old maps. New maps. I started discussing with everyone what maps we'd need, but as we were debating how far back we'd need maps from, a book caught my eye and I went to look at it while everyone else was still deciding on the maps.

I took the thin book off the shelf for a better look. It was called _Adventures in Foreign Alchemy: a Brief Guide to International Sciences._ The red-and-yellow book contained topics like Xingese alkehestry and what could be reconstructed of Xerxian alchemy from the nation's ruins.

As far as I could tell, the book was meant for the general populace, not alchemists. Still, I had to get it because of Al. How long had we wondered about why he couldn't perform alchemy when there were so many alternatives out there we didn't know about? Even if most of these techniques required the same thing Al couldn't do alchemy for, if there was any mention of a technique like the one Al was learning at that Warty-Hogs school, the book was well worth the money I'd invest in it.

When we checked out, I bought the book separately from the maps. I left it with my other luggage at Mustang's friend's, Hughes', house when we went over to his house to pour over the maps. Hughes gave the maps of Amestris a funny look while Armstrong and I explained to Ross and Brosh about the transmutation circles we were looking for, but we all dismissed it. In fact, neither of us remembered the look Hughes had given the map until much, much later.

"Here," said Armstrong, pointing to a place on the current map of Central. "Lab 5."

Hughes split us up to see what we could find. Armstrong and Ross would search the west side of Lab 5, Brosh and I would search the east side, and Hughes would meet a friend of his at the military headquarters and look through the records.

Brosh and I were off. We tunneled into the old laboratory complex from a ways away and arrived inside a building.

"The electricity's still on," Brosh said.

I nodded. "Why would there be working lights in an abandoned lab?"

The lights were just a sign that we were right to be suspicious of the lab. We found what we were looking for further in, while Brosh and I were exploring rooms on opposites sides of a dim hallway.

"Hey, Major!" Brosh called.

I crossed the hall, toward the entrance to the room he'd done no more than peek in. "It's just Ed."

"But..." Brosh began to say something, but then he shook his head. "Check this out. It's the same circle you were telling us about, isn't it?"

I entered the room to get a better look and I saw it. I fought to keep vile from making its way out of my throat as I nodded.

We heard heavy footsteps moving toward us. A suit of armor was approaching from ahead. "Looks like you've seen something you shouldn't have," it said, in a masculine voice.

Brosh pulled out his gun and shot the armor's helmet off before I could process what had happened. The helmet hit the floor with a clang that echoed off the walls and I blinked, taking in the space where there should have been a human head. The armor was empty, like my brother.

I stiffened, but Brosh reeled back to the doorway, holding his gun out in front of him.

Ignoring Brosh, I spoke directly to the armor. "You're just a soul, a soul bound to a suit of armor. It makes me sick that the military's done that too."

The armor chuckled. "I'm not like anything you've seen before, am I, boy?" Strangely, its voice, though still male, had changed.

"No, I know someone like you." I smirked, entering a fighting pose. "I used to fight against him all the time. Don't think I don't know about your blood seal." I rushed the armor before he could even pick his helmet up, transmuting a spear to charge with in just a clap of the hands.

The armor and I created a melody of metal against metal and thuds against the walls and floor.

Meanwhile, Brosh recovered from his shock enough to join in, and it's a good thing he did – I couldn't get enough space during that fight to do any more transmutations after the armor destroyed my spear, and he got me with several close blows too. But between me and Brosh, we eventually had him severed on the floor, unable to move. I went to stand above the armor's twitching chest portion.

"Tell us what you know."

"I can't do that," the armor replied.

Then Brosh and I almost jumped as the first voice we'd heard from the armor joined in the conversation, coming from the helmet lying forgotten on the floor: "We're dead anyway, and they did defeat us. We may as well tell them what we know."

I stared at the helmet. "More than one of you in the same armor?" I started examining what lay on the floor for additional blood seals.

The helmet spoke again. "It's just the two of us, brothers..." The helmet, who we soon learned was the older of a pair of murderous brothers known collectively as the Slicer, told us how he and his brother had come to be as they were. He would have told us more, but there was an explosion from the west part of Lab 5, and the brothers told us to run instead.

It was terrible. I tried to pick the armor off the floor and bring the Slicer brothers with us as Brosh and I made our escape, but Brosh picked me up with a hurried explanation of "no time" and carried me out the door, where the west end of the hallway was already on fire and the flames were heading toward us. We ran out of the building and made it to the empty dirt yard out front before it actually collapsed.

"No!"

I wasn't the one who cried out at that time. Brosh was looking at the flaming ruin with obvious pain on his face.

I hit him and pointed to one of the complex's gates, where Major Armstrong was running out, carrying something human-sized. Brosh started running after him, and I followed.


	5. Adventures in Foreign Alchemy

**Merry Christmas to all I haven't given the season's greetings to yet. I met my goal to post the chapter with Christmas in it before Christmas, and I've finished Part I as well (hence the short chapter). Please read and review!**

* * *

Adventures in Foreign Alchemy

Brosh and I learned that Armstrong had been rushing off to get Ross to a hospital. I was angry at myself – if it hadn't been for me, Ross wouldn't have been injured in Lab 5 at all.

Yet I found myself being brought along to visit her with Hughes, Armstrong, and Brosh. I caught sight of clean bandages covering the whole left side of her chest, where her arms should have been and looked away. My fault.

The closest I could come to making up for what I'd done was to offer to introduce her to the Rockbells for some automail.

She slapped me with her remaining hand after quickly apologizing in advance. I looked at her, not protesting my stinging cheek.

"Don't blame yourself," she said. "I knew of the dangers when I enlisted in the military, but I accepted them because I wanted to help the citizens of this country. Because of you, I had a chance to help."

I shook my head. "I was being selfish." I told them part of the story of why I'd joined the military – I didn't say anything about human transmutation, but I did say that I'd made a mistake that had severely injured my younger brother and that I'd only come across the information that led to Lab 5 in my personal quest to restore him to normal.

The adults talked some sense into me, and the slap had certainly helped. I guess I didn't have to pass along the information I'd found, no matter how selfishly I'd come across it, and it was critically important to see if the military's guilty of human experimentation.

Ross said she'd simply been injured in the line of duty, but I still wanted to take her to Risembool for automail.

Ross smiled. "I'd like that," she said at last. "Thank you."

We pooled together what we'd found out. Brosh and I told everyone about the human transmutation circle and the Slicer Brothers. Ross and Armstrong had also met a soul-bound suit of armor, and they had also met members of a gang with strange abilities and Ouroboros tattoos, who used _human_ as a derogatory term. Hughes had found that the lab had its most official activity during the Ishval Civil War.

I looked at the sketches Armstrong made of the Ouroboros gang – a woman with dark hair and clothing, a fat man with beady eyes, and a spiky-haired individual of ambiguous gender. "You said they used _human_ as an insult?"

I pictured three strangely-dressed people arguing in a cramped living room in Toadsfield. They had said that the Fuhrer's not even human, right? Was he the same as the three in Armstrong's sketch?

Things got even more suspicious when the Fuhrer himself came to visit Ross and told us to keep what we'd learned to ourselves, as though the entire military were our enemies. He was aware that there were corrupt individuals in the military, he said, and he claimed to want to weed them out.

* * *

I boarded a train back to East City the next morning. On the train, I stared out the window. My eyes were on the trees and fields we must have been passing, but I didn't really see any of the scenic ride.

Could we trust the Fuhrer? What was the stick-wielders' role in all this? These questions pestered my mind for the first half of the ride.

Eventually, I sighed and set my worrisome thoughts aside. I could at least use the rest of the ride to do something more productive than just worry about the problems.

Reaching into my suitcase, I retrieved the book I'd bought the day before and started reading. The book started with the alchemy from which all other alchemies were believed to be descended – Xerxian alchemy.

My mind produced pictures of toga-wearing desert-dwellers baking circles into the stone and clay artifacts that had survived. I looked at interest with pictures like potted cups with early arrays for water baked into their sides.

A picture that really stood out to me was the remnants of a palace wall, in which a richly-decorated partial transmutation circle had been found, rubies or something still set in the corners of a shape with its angles looking like they were around 108 degrees – a pentagon? I sat up a little straighter. A human transmutation circle in this book of all places?

I squinted at the tiny text in the scaled-down image. I could read it, or I could have, if the top portion of the ruin hadn't been missing.

I became so involved in my book that I nearly missed my stop. Reluctantly, I put the book away and got off the train.

* * *

"That was a short investigation."

Those were the words Colonel Useless greeted me with when I reported in. I let my temper out at him. Why did he always have to greet me with a short joke? I wasn't that small!

"No, really. How was it?"

I sat down, slouching backward on the chair. "We looked into it, but someone got injured. I need some time off to introduce her to my automail mechanic."

"I'm sure she appreciates the offer, but I still need my report." The colonel peered at me. "I told you I'm interested in anything you found during your trip. It's why I let you return to Central so soon, remember?"

"The Fuhrer ordered us not to tell anyone." The word _but_ stayed on the tip of my tongue. As useless as the colonel was, at least he was honest about his species, and I wanted to tell him. Almost.

"Fullmetal, you went to look into a military secret. If the Fuhrer's telling you to keep quiet about it, it means he's involved, or that he personally approves at the very least."

My head snapped up.

The colonel wasn't done talking. "You went to see what the military had done with Doctor Marco's research on philosopher's stones, which are made out of living human beings. Even if you won't tell me the details, I can infer that the military probably made some, maybe even still be making some, in fact."

By the time I left the colonel's office, he had gotten me to tell him everything I'd learned in Central. He seemed way too happy about learning that King Bradley really might not be human.

The only good thing that came out of seeing my commanding officer again is that he did let me take time off to introduce Ross to the Rockbells.

Unfortunately, since the Rockbells had a new client now, that meant their guest room was full and Al couldn't come home for his winter holidays. I wrote him a note about it, and the Rockbells wrote him a letter about it too.

Then I figured I might as well send him some lead on being able to use alchemy or getting his body back to cheer him up, so I went back to trying to decode the book I'd finished reading and taking notes.

* * *

Later that month, I received a brightly wrapped box in a black ribbon. According to Al, who'd sent it, it was a present for a holiday named Christmas. Inside, was a vial of some foul-looking liquid with a set of instructions.

Apparently, stick-wielders could regrow limbs with the stuff.

"You got a lead into getting our bodies back," I said to the potion.

Al did say he was learning how to make potions in school – down in some dungeon with a biased teacher, if I remember right – but could he do this already? I shook my head. No, regrowing limbs had to be out of reach for someone in his first year of study, even if he did have extensive knowledge of alchemical theory coming in. He did, however, have a job testing those older students' products...

How long had Al saved for this? I shook my head, a smile on my face. "I told you – we're getting your body back first. I don't deserve this."

I thought of the woman who'd lost an arm because of me. "I really don't deserve this."

I gave the potion to Maria Ross on my way to Dublith to ask Teacher for help, but not before I decided to give Al a gift in return. I wrapped up the book I'd been reading, _Adventures in Foreign Alchemy: A Brief_ _Guide to_ _International_ _Sciences_ , and sent it with the large, brown owl Al had used to send my gift.

It was the perfect gift really. I'd known since Al had sent me those fireworks his friends invented that his technique would not rob him of his mind, so he would still have the chance to remain a scientist if I encouraged him to stick with scientific principles by sending him something he'd love. And I knew _magic_ had a scientific basis for him to find, somewhere. The book would help him see that.

As it would turn out, the book wasn't as much help in Al's research as I hoped it would be, but it did help me feel like I was still a decent older brother over the next few months as I learned of Homunculi from Greed and of the nation-wide transmutation circle after Hughes' death and explained none of it to Al, so as not to worry him. I closed my eyes and reminded myself of that book every time I had a run-in with the Amestrian stick-wielders or had to tell the colonel to read his notes after he got Obliviated, just so I could dismiss any thoughts that Al might want to betray his alchemy training and become just another stick-wielder.

Looking back, perhaps I should have tried harder to let Al know I still loved him so he wouldn't feel as abandoned as I told him he couldn't come home, where I knew he'd be in danger, over the coming years.

End Part I


	6. Baggage

**Happy 2016! Please read and review this new chapter I got up for you guys. I hope you enjoy.**

* * *

Part II

Baggage

I slept poorly in Briggs, and not just because I'd been locked in a cell with only a bench for a bed. I was reliving the last time I'd seen my brother, looking much worse than the day I'd seen him get picked up for school.

I was in Truth's realm again when I spotted him. He was little more than skin over a skeleton with sunken eyes and hair and fingernails that were far too long to be healthy. "Al?"

Al's body stood up and looked at me. It apologized for not coming with me – it would only come with its own soul.

I was grabbed from behind by my Gate. "I'll be back for you. I promise!"

But instead of ending up outside of Gluttony with Ling, I was back in the Rockbell's living room with the sickly Al I'd run into. My nightmares about Al loosing his mind or soul to magic started replaying and I woke up, drenched in sweat.

I'd taken to carrying some of Al's letters inside my jacket, but I couldn't reach them with the wooden stocks around my wrists. I couldn't reread them to comfort myself that Al wasn't loosing his mind at least.

Instead, I had to recite to myself what the letters contained.

Over the years, Al's letters had become more sparse. Not in frequency, but in content. Al no longer told me about the details of his life, only about his research and some notes about magical theory that made no sense to me. How could you use your emotions directly to fuel something like magic?

Still, Al doing alchemy research meant he was still a scientist. He hadn't lost his mind or been won over to the philosophy of his fellow wizards.

Unfortunately, that was the day I'd lose that reassurance.

Falman came and delivered a letter to me that morning. "It had a highly unusual method of delivery, but I convinced the general that it's harmless. Owls are just how your little brother sends his mail here from England, right?"

I smiled and it was genuine. If the letter had contained good news, it would have had great timing to come comfort me in prison just as I needed to know that Al was alright. "Yeah." I paused. "Um, I can't open it myself with my hands in these."

Falman opened the envelope and slipped me the contents.

"Thanks."

He nodded and left, saying something about seeing if he could get me permission to write back. I started reading Al's letter with a smile on my face.

It seemed like Al was back to being willing to tell me about his life at first. He even started talking about one of his classes, Transfigurations. But then he wrote about what he now thinks magic is.

 _Magic,_ he wrote, _is simply the wonderful or unexplained._ The definition was fine, but he should really have found out how his alternative to alchemy worked before he did it. What if it cost him more than the human transmutation? What if it was something almost as unethical as a philosopher's stone?

I didn't finish reading the last line of his letter. _I'll simply have to accept it_ , that is, everything he was learning at school, _as magic..._

I crumpled his letter up the best I could with my hands in stocks. "Stupid Al! Stupid, stupid Al! You can't do this to me!"

What about science? What about ethics? What about everything we'd ever learned? Al had gone against that. He'd _betrayed_ our lifestyle. He'd betrayed me.

I threw Al's crumpled letter against the wall and started stomping on it. I was still doing so when Falman came back in.

"Hey, Ed?"

I looked through the bars of my cell. "Falman! I am not writing back to my brother right now, even if I have permission. I want nothing to do with him."

The man wilted. "Do you have any idea what I did to get you permission?"

I crossed my arms. "Al's a traitor. I'm not writing back to him."

The two of us stood there in silence for a moment. Sighing, I uncrossed my arms. "Thanks for getting me permission. I don't really want to write back to Al, but I guess I could write Winry and Granny Pinako. They'll want to know what's going on with Al too, in case he didn't tell them."

So I wrote the Rockbells and told her how disgusting Al had become, what he was willing to risk for his magic. I'd finished writing it (and arguing about postage) by the time Kimblee arrived, Winry in tow.

I was angry that Kimblee waved Winry's life over my head like that, but there wasn't much I could do. I couldn't even go warn everyone who was escaping to Briggs through the tunnels after the blizzard hit.

Instead, I ended up confronting Kimblee and his two chimeras that hadn't tried to run away. I got an injury that proved nearly fatal and had to use a bit of my own soul as the exchange for a transmutation to patch myself up.

"Ed?"

I woke up to Winry's worried voice.

"Winry?" I'm sure my voice came out slurred, but I had to make sure it was really her. I couldn't remember clearly at that moment, but I knew there was some reason why she shouldn't have been there. Something important.

Her voice softened. "Ed, go back to sleep. We contacted Colonel Mustang and we're taking you to some doctor named Knox."

I fell back to sleep.

When I next woke up, I scowled at the face I found above me. I wished it had belonged to someone more tolerable – even the colonel's face would have been fine. But no, when I woke up, I saw my father's face above me.

"Edward?"

I growled under my breath. "Hohenheim."

My father gazed down at me. "You're safe now."

I sat up. "Where's Winry?"

"I can get her." Hohenheim gestured to some envelopes on my nightstand. "Your brother's sent you some mail by owl. We wish we could have written him back to say that you've been injured, but it seems the military's on the lookout for you. What have you been doing?"

Crossing my arms, I demanded again to see Winry. I didn't want to see my father, but I did want to see that Winry was alright.

"We'll talk later." Hohenheim stood up and left the room.

While I was waiting for Winry to arrive, I turned to my letters from the brother I thought had betrayed me. "What do you want?"

I sighed. Might as well. I mean, what if Al had come to his senses?

Reading through, I saw that, no, Al had not. Still, I skimmed through a small stack of letters to confirm this.

Then I opened the second-to-final envelope and read its letter – Al claimed he was never speaking to me again, yet there was one more letter from him. Was it an earlier one?

Once I saw what was inside the final envelope, my heart involuntarily clenched – Al had contacted me after he'd said he wouldn't, to beg for help. He was in danger over in England.

"You idiot."

* * *

I couldn't help but have nightmares that night. I relived the night of the human transmutation, and I saw Al's face and heard his screams again as he was taken by the Gate.

I woke up in a sweat, and my eyes wandered over to the letters on the nightstand. I looked down at the clothes someone had changed me into. I wished I was still in the ones I'd had when I was at Briggs because they'd had Al's letters in them. What had happened to them?

Even if Al was a traitor, he was my younger brother and the last image I had of him was of him as an eleven-year-old boy. Stupid. Helpless. Desperate. Same as I'd been when I'd ruined his life with my alchemy.

I rummaged around the room Doctor Knox had me in and found Al's old letters. I read through them once again for comfort, trying to make sense of words like _pureblood, Muggleborn,_ and _Squib_. I just knew that Al had briefly looked into what wizards knew of magic's heredity.

Lying back down, thoughts of Al in danger in England and Winry in danger in Amestris ran through my mind. I didn't sleep well that night.

* * *

In the morning, I actually wanted to see the colonel. As much as I hated to admit it, I needed his help, and maybe even my old man's too.

Hohenheim took me to meet the colonel outside of his work, in the back of some bar, I think. There was a kitchen and a small office. We crammed inside the small office, which consisted of a chair, a desk, a bulletin board, and a calendar.

The colonel took the chair for himself, leaving me and the old man standing against the white walls.

Mustang turned the chair toward us. "Fullmetal, what's this about?"

"Everyone's in trouble," I said. "Winry and Granny, even Al."

"Would someone tell me what's going on?" Hohenheim asked, looking between me and the colonel.

The colonel briefly explained about the Homonculi and the hostages they were using against us. He also said that Al had not been a hostage at the last time he'd checked.

"They still don't know where he is," I said. "But he's in trouble a different way – British wizards are having their own share of it."

I showed the colonel and my old man the latest letter from my brother.

 _Things are going to become dangerous in this country very soon – this country will soon get laws that will discriminate against me our my family. I need to come home._

"Al hasn't given us the full situation, but what he's told us doesn't sound nearly as bad as this country. Perhaps someone should go check it out." The colonel was looking at me.

"Me?"

Meeting my eyes, the colonel said, "There is a possibility you or he might not make it out of this alive, so this could be the last chance to see your brother."

"I don't really want to see him, and if he wasn't in trouble, I don't think he'd really want to see me either."

Hohenheim looked at me. "Why wouldn't you want to see each other? You still love each other."

I shook my head. "I'm not so sure about that."

Once again, it was up to the adults to talk some sense into me. I wasn't convinced that Al still loved me, but I still loved him.

"You're angry with your brother, but because he's in danger, you want to help him. If you were in trouble, don't you think you could turn to Al for help?" Hohenheim's golden eyes met mine, and the colonel hadn't looked away either.

I mumbled my next sentence under my breath and had to repeat myself for the adults: "But Al betrayed me."

"When did this happen?"

"He believes in magic!" I stood still for a moment after my outburst, eyes darting between the adults. Hohenheim was frowning, and so was the colonel.

"Magic?" Hohenheim repeated. "Alphonse?"

"Not you too! Sure you're rotten and good-for-nothing, but you're supposed to be an alchemist!"

"I'm familiar with plenty of wizards." Hohenheim put his hand to his chest, for some reason on the _plenty of wizards_ rather than the _I'm_. "Alphonse has magic. Are you sure?" Then, he smiled. "I never thought, one of my sons..."

I groaned. I looked at the colonel. Surely he was sane like me, right?

"What do you mean that he believes in magic?" he asked. "I thought you agreed that there's some sort of ability he has that's commonly known as magic."

"I got more letters from him while I was injured." I paused, taking a breath. "He told me he believes that science will never be able to explain his abilities, so he's abandoning science."

"So when did Al betray you?"

"He's gone against everything we learned together!"

"Don't you think you're taking this a bit too personally? Perhaps if you'd gone to study magic, you would have reached your brother's conclusions too."

Hohenheim cleared his throat. "Pinako told me that Al risked his life to pull you from your human transmutation circle. Are you telling me he stopped loving you so easily?"

I looked at the blue carpet covering the floor. "It's been years. He's changed."

"And yet he still wrote you. Are those the actions of someone who hates you? If he doesn't hate you for the accident, I doubt he'd hate you over a petty difference of opinion."

For some reason, my throat felt a little smaller, like I was starting to choke up. "I doubt he still loves me, but I guess I still owe him. The colonel's right – this could be my last chance to return his body for him."

Hohenheim gazed at me. "What are you planning to trade?"

I folded my arms around myself. "I'll think of something."

"Edward, bring me along, let me handle it."

I shook my head. "I'm the one who messed up; it's got to be me."

The old man then told me about Xerxes and becoming a philosopher's stone, but I still refused his offer, pushing down a new mess of emotions. "I told Al I wouldn't use human lives to get his body back."

"Then what are you planning to trade?"

I looked around, lost in thought. I couldn't use a philosopher's stone, and no amount of money counted for more than its materials in a transmutation.

I barely noticed the office or the adults still trying to talk to me. Then I looked down at my hands. I was the youngest State Alchemist either – I had to be able to think of something! And I doubted trading my remaining arm or even both of my remaining limbs would be enough to get Al back, even just his body.

I started to lower my gloved hands. I'd lost Al for real when I let him go look into the lead about what was wrong with his Gate. His Gate...

If there were the occasional wizards that couldn't do magic – Squids or something – then why couldn't there be one more alchemist who can't do alchemy?

"My Gate," I said. I looked at the colonel and my old man. "What if I traded my Gate to get Al's body back?"

"Fullmetal, don't be ridiculous. Without your Gate, you couldn't do alchemy ever again." The colonel stopped, stroking his chin. "Actually, that might not be so bad..."

That was when we started drafting a plan to deal with the Homonculi and the Promised Day – no matter who else they might find, if I didn't have a Gate, they'd be one short when they tried to kill us.

I crossed my arms. "I'm willing to give up my Gate to fix my mistake, but I don't like the idea of being without it when it's time to fight. I can't protect everyone without it."

And that's when I had to swallow my pride. The colonel promised to get Winry and Granny out of the country if I'd make sure to go through with trading my Gate for Al before the Promised Day. He said that he and the others would cover for me when it was time to fight too.

I still didn't like it, but I had to do what I had to do, even if it was just to make right my sin, right?

* * *

The day I met the colonel at the train station, where he was smuggling me out of the country in a baggage car, I traded him a letter for a letter. I left with him a letter for Winry to hang onto, in case she ever wanted to explain things to Al; he handed me a fully addressed and postmarked letter for Al, saying that I'd gone MIA.

"I still think you should just tell him what's going on." The colonel pocketed the letter I wanted to leave with Winry.

I rolled my eyes. "It's not like he'd care."

"Right." The colonel drawled the word out and used such a sarcastic tone that I knew he was mocking me.

I sent a small glare at him. "Even if he did, I wouldn't tell him. If he cared, he'd come to help me and just put himself in danger."

"Suit yourself. I still say you're being more than a _little_ bit of an idiot."

I renewed my glare at the colonel, but I knew better than to cause a scene when I was trying to sneak out of the country.

So I ended up being hidden in a boxful of old armor of all things and loaded onto the train by the colonel and my old man. Encased in darkness, I had no chance to study my English-phrase book as the train started chugging westward.

It was on that train that an owl nearly gave me away by delivering a letter. I couldn't read that either in the dark, but I hoped it was from Al. Was that idiot okay?

The owl hooted. That bird had better go away, 'cause I wasn't writing to Al and giving the fact away with the shortened delivery time that I was no longer in Amestris.

I waited for what seemed like centuries to get to London, cramped in the dark with old armor, the owl hooting for my reply, and worries competing for room in my mind.


	7. Finding Al

Finding Al

When I arrived in London, it was raining. Ignoring my soaked clothes, I asked around for sites I knew were connected to the wizarding world - King's Cross Station and Diagon Alley. They sounded like normal enough places that I could get directions to them without finding a wizard first, and once I was there, surely I could find Al.

At first, I could only find people who could give me directions to King's Cross Station. I made my way through the crowds, searching for Al's Platform 9 ¾. He said the entrance was somehow through the solid barrier between platforms nine and ten, right?

I found the barrier and found nothing but a dirty wall of bricks. I was supposed to walk through this thing?

The barrier felt solid enough to me. I took my left glove off and started feeling around for any sort of trick that would open up a passageway of some sort.

The bricks were gritty. They were rough and cold too. The bricks were just normal bricks, and I couldn't find any tricks to access the platform.

I scowled at the barrier. Al hadn't gotten it wrong when he'd written home about wizards' strange alchemy, had he?

I dismissed the thought - walking through a barrier wouldn't be something he'd easily forget, and even if I still thought that magic had cost him his mind, he couldn't have been that far gone after his first day.

Pulling out my phrasebook, I flipped to the transportation section and wrote the platform number in dark blue ink. Then I looked around for someone who could help me. I spotted a station attendant in a well-kept uniform.

"Hey." I got the woman's attention. "Where is…?" I jabbed my finger at the number written in my book.

She shook her head and said something about there not being a platform like that - I think. To be sure, I did the same thing to another attendant and got similar results.

I returned to the barrier between Platforms 9 and 10 and slouched against it. I observed people rushing by me on either side.

Everyone around were wearing normal, dull-colored clothes. There were no emerald cloaks like the chimera-lady's or brightly-colored robes like the peopled from the magical government in Amestris. Since arriving in ENgland, I hadn't spotted one person I could recognize as a witch or wizard.

Now what was I going to do? I had to find Al.

I left the train station after a while, when it had at least stopped raining.

It wasn't until an owl found me shivering behind some putrid-smelling dumpster in an alleyway that night that I had any contact with the wizarding world.

I took the thin envelope from the largish bird that found me. I glanced at the owl - to deliver mail, it had to be trained, right?

I had an idea. "Stay," I said to the owl.

I stood up, wrapping my arms around myself as though it would ward off the damp and chill that surrounded me. I only let go when I reached a better-lit spot where a street light allowed me to make out the _Edward Elric - possibly at the Rockbell residence_ on the envelope's front.

I frowned. It wasn't neat enough to be Al's handwriting, and he wouldn't have used my full name anyway, even if he had stopped calling me _Brother_.

I turned the envelope over and opened it up. The words inside were in English, but the letters rearranged themselves as I watched. I gasped, but then I shook my head. "More important things to worry about."

 _To the world's worst brother,_

Whoever the writer was, I didn't like them already.

 _It's Al's friends, Fred and George, with Tonks helping with the translation again. Your brother's having a serious emergency with his armor- the least you could do is write back!_

 _His soul is being rejected, and you're the only one who can help. In fact, you have to help, seeing as you're the one who did it to him in the first place._

 _We're concerned that he's going to_ die _here. He loves you, and you're letting him die._

 _If you don't help, we'll track you down and turn you into a newt, and it won't be just a joke either._

 _Sincerely,_

 _Fred and George Weasley_

"Rejected?" I stared at the word, written in bright green ink.

Was the blood seal wearing off, or was Al paying for magic with his soul?

I thought back to the last time I'd been to the Gate of Truth - Al's body was standing there, weak and growing weaker, ever waiting for its soul in the blank white expanse of Truth's realm.

I'd promised I'd be back.

But if Al was rejected as these Fred and George people said, would I find him at the Gate, or would I find a living, soulless corpse?

At least he wouldn't be in a philosopher's stone.

My fingers slid down the parchment that wizards are so fond of and rested near another part of significance to me.

 _Your brother loves you…._

My eyes did something Al had complained his no longer could during the short months he'd accompanied me on my State Alchemist missions: they filled with salty tears.

I blinked, so as not to the the tears fall. If Al couldn't cry, then what right did I have to?

I'd been decided, but I was even more determined: I would get Al's body back, and I would not let him see me. The choice was no longer my selfishly avoiding a traitor, but me protecting a younger brother who loves me - he'd try to help out if he knew what was going on and be put in danger by coming to my rescue. It was better if Al thought I hate him, at least for now.

I returned to the alleyway, where the owl was still awaiting my response.

"I can't send anything back with you - they'd know it was from me." I looked at the bird, which hooted twice in response. I smirked. "Or can I?"

I reached into an inner jacket pocket and pulled out the slightly damp letter Mustang had written for me to inform Al that I'm missing. I dangled it in front of the owl. "You want this, don't you?"

Hooting, the owl held out its leg.

"Not until you take me to get my own owl."

I felt foolish talking to the owl - as if it would understand Amestrian - but somehow the owls could always track me down, so there was definitely at least something special about them.

With a hoot, the owl swooped out of the alley. I followed it and saw it perched on the same streetlight I'd read by. It made eye contact and started flying down the street.

"It's not a chimera or something, is it?" I asked myself, but I followed the owl anyway. We went through the streets - a lot emptier at this time of night. The owl kept on a path lined with buildings taller and more modern than the ones back in Amestris, even in Central.

As we went, I noticed more and more of Britain's strange models of cars on the streets, despite the late hour. Were we heading downtown?

After nearly an hour, the owl landed on a patch of the wet, rain-covered sidewalk between two stores.

I walked up to it. "I don't see anything here."

The owl started tapping on something invisible with its beak. Moments later, a bald little old man in a black robe opened a door, and a building whose era of construction was out of sorts with its surrounding buildings appeared, sporting a wooden sign above its door that designated it as the Leaky Cauldron. Whatever that was in Amestrian.

I stepped inside the Leaky Cauldron and found myself in something with a bar and a few tables. The place smelled like alcohol and was currently vacant, except for a dark-haired man in all black sitting in the corner, drinking something red.

Great, the owl had brought me to some wizard bar. At least it was apparently so late - or so early in the morning, more likely - that I wouldn't have to deal with a bunch of drunks.

The bald man said something to me in English, but I could only pick a greeting out of his unintelligible stream of gibberish.

I shook my head. "No English."

The man - the bartender, perhaps? - just smiled and led me to the bar. He set a menu with several pictures in front of me.

I saw that it was more than just drinks that the place served - tempting pictures of foods like seasoned eggs and some sort of meat shining with a glaze made up the selection. Saliva moistened my mouth and my stomach let out a growl, reminding me that I hadn't eaten in a while.

Unfortunately, I knew for a fact that I didn't have any wizarding money. I set the menu down and shook my head. I pulled out my phrasebook again and thumbed through for the right words. "Where is the bank?"

The bartender took me out back, past a hall full of numbered rooms and through a door that led into a walled-off space with a trash.

He tapped on a brick a few times, and the whole thing opened into an arch. The bald man pointed to a bulky white building straight ahead and said something I didn't understand.

I told him as much.

The bald man held up a wrist and pushed up the sleeve of his silky black wizard's robe, revealing a wristwatch. Tapping it, he said, "Nine."

I nodded, stepping out into the alley anyway. "Thank you."

Looking around, I saw some dark shapes displayed in various windows, but the street wasn't lit well enough for me to make anything out. I also spotted various dark human shapes sleeping around the street.

I would have much preferred to sleep in one of the rooms back at the pub, where there was surely a soft bed and warm blankets for the guests, but what was I to do without any money? Because I needed to avoid attention, I could only use alchemy in a true life-or-death emergency, so even transmuting gold was out.

I went and found a small, unclaimed niche to sleep in for the night, trying hard not to thank my size. I am not that small!

The owl from earlier came and found me again in that niche, hooting loudly.

I rubbed its feathery head. "I'll give it to you when I'm sure I can get an owl of my own. Why don't you go hunting or something until then?"

I made sure my wallet and silver pocketwatch were securely hidden and, with much difficulty, went to sleep.

* * *

In the morning, I woke stiff and sore. Sunbeams pierced through my heavy eyelids and I forced myself to wake up.

I was just on an unfamiliar street, where people were rushing around in tight groups, hardly anyone daring to speak above a whisper.

I saw the witches and wizards that had been sleeping on the street with me on their knees, tugging at passersby's robes, begging for something.

And yet, this must once have been the glorious magical shopping center Al had gone to for his school supplies.

Looking around, I saw items displayed in the store windows that clearly came out of some fairy tale book - cauldrons, broomsticks, and the like. I spotted the bookstore Al must have gotten his books from, but books in a language I couldn't read didn't really entice me.

As I kept blinking and looking around, my brain woke up a little more. I processed more details - a couple street vendors selling what looked like amulets; a couple boarded-up shops; wizards standing in front of the bank, waving something over the people entering it; and the uncanny fact that not a single one of the witches and wizards on this street was wearing a color other than black.

Al was right - something bad was happening in wizarding England. If home was any safer for him, I'd bring him home with me.

I tidied myself up a bit, beating some mud off my clothes and tucking back a few loose hairs, and then I joined the line for the bank.

Whatever security was checking for, I didn't set off any alarms, and the man checking me - a towering pole of body odor with scars across his face - just growled at me a bit and waved me through, eyeing me as I walked up the white marble steps.

Inside, I saw several short beings that I supposed had to be chimeras of some sort, but I couldn't begin to identify what the poor souls had been crossed with.

I was the only one giving the beings a second look. Everyone else was simply conducting their business with them.

I shook off visible signs of my unease and reached for my phrase book. I approached one of the beings and pulled money out of my wallet. "I'd like to make an exchange."

The being took my money, and after examining each bill carefully - even putting the corners into its mouth - gave me a pile of coins: gold, silver, and bronze.

On leaving the bank, the owl from the night before flew up to me with a hoot.

I pulled my MIA letter out of my pocket, confident enough to send it now.

I entered a shop with many bird on display in its window and got the store clerk to help me pick out a mail owl and left him with a good pile of coins.

One leaving the shop, I noticed a new addition to the street, lying abandoned on its sides - small piles of pamphlets that the security wizards were trying to dispose of. I sneaked one out of a pile they hadn't reached yet and took a look at its graphics.

Among the graphics, I saw a diagram of the Gate. A concept Al told me wizarding alchemy didn't have. I smiled at it. Al…

I pocketed the pamphlet and quickly dodged a ray of red light coming toward me. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw the stinky bank guard.

I set down my owl cage just long enough to transmute a barrier between me and my attacker. I let my owl loose. "Find me later." Then I took off running.

The man blasted down my barrier and I used my automail arm to protect my head from the debris. People ran away from where my wall had been, and I followed their example.

The man chased me through the Leaky Cauldron and through several streets in the normal part of London, blasting several spells at me and causing panic among pedestrians and drivers alike. I finally lost him, hopping down into a manhole and sealing the opening above me.

I didn't dare to leave the sewers for several hours.

By the early evening, I had managed to get back to seemingly safe streets and clean myself up in the restroom at some mall. I even managed to get myself something to eat. I found a bench to sit at and waited for my new owl.

"Okay, owl, listen up. I'm not going to name you…."

The owl screeched in protest.

"... I don't even know if I can keep you, but right now I need you. You're going to help me find my brother."

I met the owl's yellow eyes with my own. It didn't have any protests that time.

"You're going to fly to him slowly enough that I can follow, and then I need you to deliver a note to come and meet me. Think you can do that?"

The bird just blinked and held out its leg.

"What? Don't tell me you need to deliver something to take me to my brother? The other owl didn't need anything to take me to the street of magic shops."

The owl stubbornly held out its leg.

I groaned. "Fine. I'll get you something to deliver." Glancing at the sun's position in the sky, I said, "We'll leave tomorrow morning."

I found myself a safeish spot to drift off and slept on the streets for another night.

* * *

The next day, I picked up a random stick out of a park and gave it to my owl. "It's for Alphonse Elric. Go slow."

I had to take several buses and trains with coins I picked off the street as fare, but whatever the bird was thinking, my owl actually did wait up for me.

The most troublesome part of my journey was a group I encountered in the woods, calling themselves something like _Snatchers._


	8. Trouble

Trouble

I woke up cold, sore, and wet again. I hadn't slept on the streets again, but were some woods infested with hostiles really any better?

I'm not usually one to get up early, but I was up early that morning, drying my clothes and wishing I could light a fire. Instead, I took out the threatening note that my bird would deliver to Al. Now that I knew about the group calling themselves the Snatchers, I had to be sure that my brother wouldn't get caught by them. I took out the pamphlet of Al's that I'd picked up in Diagon Alley and alchemized the paper with the letters I needed out of the pamphlet and onto the bottom of my note.

My owl landed next to me, looking at the note and stretching out its leg. I patted its head. "Not quite yet – I've got to find a spot where I can set up a circle first. It's got to be big enough, and it's got to let me hide the lines from Al.

When I was warm and dry enough, I set out in search of a good clearing. I found one several minutes' walk north of the pink house Al was apparently staying in. It was a decent-sized clearing, and it was completely overgrown – there were enough bushes and tall enough grass to easily hide my transmutation circle if I were to dig small trenches into the soil. "Perfect."

I sent my owl off to Al and got to work. A little after noon, I was sweaty and covered in dirt, but the circle was complete.

As I was double-checking my circle to be sure it was all there, I heard several small animals scurrying away from something. I hid in some thick bushes next to a nearby tree and peered out.

The animals were apparently getting away from a man in a shabby brown suit. He was carrying a stick in his hands – not a wand either – in one hand and his actual magical stick in the other, pointed at the first stick.

It was the plain, normal stick lit up. The man tossed it aside and started looking up in the trees.

Was he looking for something? I frowned. Or some _one_?

I had to get out of there, at least for a while. I watched the man and waited for enough of a break to get a head start.

The man started looking through the bushes on the other side of the clearing. He spotted something on the ground – probably part of my circle – and knelt down.

That was my chance. I took off running.

I heard a voice call after me something in English, but I didn't pause. I heard footsteps running after me, but I knew I had a head start. And hey, I'm fast, right? Surely I could outrun this guy – I just had to be sure not to get hit by spells, so I weaved my way through the vegetation, remaining a moving target.

When I dared, I transmuted a wall of earth between me and my pursuer. I ran a ways further and transmuted a fox hole to hide in. The man didn't catch up.

A while later, I checked on my circle and found that it was fine. It would do to get Al his body back.

I didn't dare catch something to eat that I'd need to cook with Snatchers around, but I was able to find a couple plants that it looked like the animals had been munching on and had them as a small lunch while I was waiting for evening to arrive so I could turn Al back to normal without being seen.

Unfortunately, my lunch was cut short when I heard shouting coming from the direction of the ugly house. I specifically caught Al's name.

I jumped to my feet. If I could hear them, what were the chances that the Snatchers couldn't?

Ignoring the twigs snagging my clothing, I followed the shouts until I was able to hear one of Al's, at just as high as a soprano as the day I'd had his body ripped away from the real world: "Hey! Give me back my brother!"

I increased my pace – why did my younger brother have to get himself in such big trouble?

Then there was a streaking red light zooming through the woods and hitting a small shape that I knew had to be Al. He was surrounded by a semi-circle of Snatchers closing in on him. One of them reached his side before I could do anything.

I stopped where I was and clapped. I slammed my hands to the ground and transmuted an earthy fist that I sent at the Snatcher threatening my brother.

That Snatcher fell to the ground, but I'd gotten the attention of his fellows. They turned on me, wands all pointing my way.

We started a dance of sorts – they provided the shouts and lighting and I leaped around their spells; I provided the spikes and fists and they provided the flying bodies. But in dancing, no one's supposed to get hurt.

Before I got the last jerk who was stupid enough to mess with my little brother, he hit me in the side with some sort of attack that ripped through my skin and muscles. I pressed a hand to my wound and pulled away a red glove.

I glared at the Snatcher and did one final transmutation to wrap up the fight. He was wrapped up in a confining blanket of earth.

Wincing, I pressed my hand back to my side and held it there. Al was safe from the Snatchers at the moment at least, but he wouldn't stay that way if he hung around. "Can you move?" I called.

Al didn't answer. Was he really okay? I was feeling pretty weak myself, but I had to make sure he'd be okay. "Al, I..."

I don't think I got to finish my sentence. I blacked out, and when I came to, I was lying on something soft, covered in something warm. I didn't really want to wake up, not now that I was finally back to sleeping in a bed, but my eyelids started twitching anyway. Perhaps I could just lie there for a while.

"Thank goodness," said Al's voice. "I was really starting to worry about you."

"Al?"

It really was my younger brother – or him in his fake body anyway. His golden eyes were fixed on me, a gentle smile on his lips. "We couldn't take you to a hospital without putting you in even more danger, so we've brought you to our hideout for the moment. We fixed you up ourselves."

Hospital? Now that he mentioned it, my side did have a dull ache in it.

That's right – I'd been hit by some spell fired off by one of the Snatchers, defending my younger brother who'd run into them carelessly. My blood boiled, but as angry as I still was at Al for choosing such a dangerous unknown thing as that technique called magic over something we understood better, like alchemy, I didn't think he deserved to be the target of my anger at the Snatchers as well. I made myself breathe before I snapped at him. "Al, you idiot!"

"What?"

"I told you to avoid the Snatchers!"

"I was trying to..." He started explaining himself, but I wasn't really listening that closely to him. I barely noticed when he caught on about my threatening note. There was a beat before he started scolding me like he'd used to. "You're so stupid! Even if you're mad at me about magic or whatever and refuse to let me come home, if you cared enough about me to warn me about the Snatchers, then you didn't have to threaten me."

There it was – Al really did still love me like everyone said he did. He hadn't betrayed me at all. I winced and crossed my arms. Turning to look at the wall with the wallpaper as ugly as the exterior of the house, I quickly thought of a way to save the plan to keep him from following me into danger. "Who says I care about you? I just owe you a debt I need to repay, that's all, for saving me from my own stupidity. I promised I'd get your body back. You were supposed to be lured into that circle, and I was supposed to take off once I'd gotten your body back. You weren't even supposed to see my face."

I didn't look at Al, but I could still hear the anger in his voice as he told me he wanted to hit me. I could hear his footsteps moving across the floorboards and decided I'd better at least try to salvage something before he left the room. "I talked to Granny Pinako before I left. She's sorry for not offering you a place to stay when you needed to leave school. She wishes she could. To be honest, she was taking my advice not to let you return."

There was another pause. "I accept Granny's apology, Ed," said Al, then he banged the door shut.

I turned back onto my back and found myself alone in a room that smelled like an old person. I crinkled my nose and tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn't stop thinking about Al. He seemed fine, so he was going to be fine, right? Maybe I could even get him back when it was safe to return to Amestris.

Eventually, I gave up and went back to glaring at the wall. I didn't even move when the door opened – I didn't want to talk to Al.

It wasn't Al's voice I heard. I heard a male voice saying something in English.

Rolling over, I spotted the intruders to my room: two freakishly tall, red-headed twins. They'd brought in a tray of food – a bowl of something and a teacup. I took a sniff and smelled some sort of meat, maybe chicken.

My mouth watered up and my stomach growled. I grinned at the twins – I knew they were wizards, but they couldn't be all bad if they brought me such good-smelling food. Sitting up, I accessed one of the few English words I knew. "Food!"

The twins set the tray down on the medium-wood nightstand next to my bed and I immediately started slurping up the soup. It was only light fare, but it was flavorful. It definitely had chicken in it, and I thought I tasted pepper and some sort of oil in it.

The twins said something to me, but the only word I made out for sure was _Al_.

"No English."

"You," said one of the twins, pointing at me for good measure.

"Al," said the other twin. "Brothers?"

I nodded, lowering the chicken soup a bit. "Al is here?"

"Yeah."

"Thank you. Al here. No speak Al." I was trying to thank them for sheltering Al from all the villains running around England and ask them not to tell Al that he had to stay here, but I had to repeat what little English I had to say that with a couple times. In the end, I think they got it.

"Why?" they asked.

I sipped my soup, trying to remember if I'd ever come across the word they'd used. I don't think I had, but I thought I knew what question I'd have if I was being asked to tell someone in the dangerous country that is Amestris that they can't go home: why.

Finishing the soup, I grasped for words I could use. "Amestris is bad."

From the energy they used to spit out the next few words, I think they cussed. Or they were just telling me off for not being more helpful – I don't really know. Then they asked me a question I didn't understand at all.

I shook my head. "English is bad."

One of the twins looked at the other and asked him something. The second twin flashed him a thumbs-up and slipped downstairs.

Hoping they didn't try to get Al to act as a translator, I turned my attention back to my food. I picked up the steaming brown liquid that I thought was tea and brought it to my lips.

"Ouch!"

The teacup had just bitten me! Brown liquid sloshed onto my sleeves and blankets and soaked through, and to make matters worse, the twin the had stayed in my room was laughing.

I glared at him. "Very funny," I said in Amestrian. I held up my blanket pointedly.

The twin whipped out his wand and the hot liquid disappeared from the fabric, but I didn't trust the teacup again. I put it back on the tray and left the whole thing on the nightstand.

After a few minutes, the twin who'd left the room returned with a pregnant lady with bubblegum-pink hair. She had her own wand out and sent yet another spell at me.

How often did these wizards have to use their wands anyway? Especially with an unknown price hanging over their heads for magic.

Trying to figure out what this spell had done to me, I started examining myself. I'd been cleaned up and had gotten bandages wrapped securely around my wound, but I otherwise couldn't find anything different than I'd been lately.

"Wotcher, he really doesn't like magic, does he?"

It was the woman that spoke. I was slightly impressed that she could speak my language that well, but I still glared at her. "What did you do?"

"It's just a translation charm. Since you don't speak good English, and we don't speak Amestrian, and we need you to tell us what's going on..."

"A translation charm," I grumbled to myself. Now that I was listening closer for it, I could hear a second language stacked on top of my own Amestrian. "There should be no way on earth we should be able to speak to each other this well without one of us learning someone's language."

I frowned to myself. What could that exchange be that allows this?

The people in my room didn't allow me much time to think about it. "You were going to tell use why Al can't go home," the twins said.

"Yeah." I gestured for the two of them to come closer. When they were within arm's reach, I grabbed their heads and knocked them together, leaving both red-heads rubbing where there had been impact. "Just be glad you're friends of Al's or I wouldn't have gone so easy on you for your stupid prank. I still owe you more when I'm stronger. You shouldn't mess with life."

That was my best explanation for what happened to the teacup anyway. But if I thought they'd messed with human life, well, I wouldn't simply be annoyed at them for the bite, so I was willing to move the conversation forward.

The twins weren't quite ready for that. "We were going to call it even for putting Al through so much trouble..."

"...but then you had to get violent with us..."

"...so we think _we_ owe you something."

Stupid twins. I crossed my arms and huffed, lying back down in bed and turning my head away.

"You still owe us an explanation."

Unfortunately, I did. "I'm only telling you because of Al. I need help keeping him out of trouble, plus I do owe you for hiding him." I found my hand curling around my covers, forming a fist as I thought of what I'd have to telling them next. "I just got out of a hostage situation back home..."

I twisted back to face the wizards and explained about my government's method of controlling me and the counter-tactics Mustang helped me come up with of getting everyone who was a liability out of the country. I asked them to help me keep Al from running in after me, and I even said please.

The woman crossed her arms. "At least in Amestris he could use magic to defend himself. There aren't enough wizards in your country for it to have its own school, but there is enough for a small wizarding government, and they, at the moment, are not so corrupt that they'll come arrest your brother if he's discovered."

I sighed and told them the one thing I hoped I wouldn't have to tell them. I didn't like talking about philosopher's stones after all.

I didn't say the words _philosopher's stone_ , but I did call it the devil's research, and that was enough for our eavesdropper to know what I was talking about.

Al burst through the door. "The devil's research?" he asked. "As in, a philosopher's stone?"

So much for keeping Al out of trouble.


	9. Fighting With Al

Fighting With Al

"Alphonse, what are you doing here?" The twins looked at the eavesdropper who'd barged in on us.

Part of me wanted to know what Al was doing there too, but it wasn't as important as that he'd heard me talking about all Amestris getting turned into a philosopher's stone. I had to convince him to stay out of things. "Al, I've seen what it's like for souls trapped inside a philosopher's stone: they're in extreme torment, with no way out of it, waiting more than centuries to be used up in a transmutation. Most souls I encountered couldn't even retain their individuality. I don't want that for you. I think even staying in your armor would be better."

Al was angry at me. I began to mentally prep myself for a fight as he balled his fists and shouted. "Ed, what about everyone else? If you would've told me about this and let me help, maybe there'd be no philosopher's stone. You think I want to see Winry and Teacher get trapped in a philosopher's stone?"

I sat up, keeping an eye on Al. His fists were still clenched and he kept his eyes on me, but he was not making any other moves to actually get physical yet. The grown wizards were looking between the two of us, frowns forming on their faces.

"We've got it handled back home, Alphonse," I said. "I just don't need my _little brother_ to come put himself in danger."

Al displayed more of our physical training – he stood in horse position, fists ready to go. He was staring into my eyes with his fake golden ones – a challenge.

I frowned. "Do you think you can still even beat me, Al? I bet you haven't even stayed in practice with martial arts. You spent a little too much time getting sold into magic, didn't you?"

I climbed out of bed, keeping my discomfort to myself. My wounded side protested the movement, sending signals of dull pain along my nervous system. I'd just have to end this quickly.

I bounded across what little distance there was between me and Al and sent a punch toward his chest with my automail. He blocked it.

The adult wizards, concerned before, had definitely noticed our fight. I'll admit that I would've loved to beat my little brother in our fight, but as long as the wizards kept Al safe, I didn't care if they broke us up.

They danced around us with their wands out, and Al seemed to care more about whether they intervened than I did. He hissed something at them about magic.

He kicked me too close to my injured side as he was telling the adults to keep out of our fight and I fell on my back. I winced. Fresh pain shot from my wound.

Al was coming toward me. Thinking fast, I grabbed his foot and rolled away. He fell backward, onto one of the twins.

I tried to get up, but I'd only gotten to my knees before the other twin came at me. He was trying to grab me, but I didn't really want to chance him touching my tender side, so I knocked his hands away.

I only sat back after I'd transmuted the wooden floor, trapping Al in a little cage, same for everyone else. No one would be touching my injured side but me, and it looked like I'd won.

I put pressure on the previously clean bandage around my side and winced.

"Your wound reopened, didn't it," Al said, and it wasn't a question either. "You shouldn't have fought me. Besides, if I can use magic in Amestris, I can handle myself."

Vulgar thoughts came to my mind, and while I intellectually knew that my younger brother hadn't betrayed me, his words still stung like he had. What sort of alchemist speaks of using magic?

I kicked Al's cage. "Shut up. You still don't even know what the exchange is, do you?"

"It's not human souls!"

Although my brother was still giving me a dirty look, I couldn't help but relax at his words. "You're certain?"

I still wasn't happy with my brother for choosing an alternative to alchemy with an unknown and potentially dangerous price, but if it didn't use souls, it had to be better than a philosopher's stone, right? Al was no longer the scientist I wanted him to be, but my brother was no Kimblee.

Al groaned. "I sent you my notes on magic theory. Magic's channeled by emotion, and how would emotion get a soul?"

I frowned. "Your emotions live in your own soul. You shouldn't risk using that so lightly." If anyone noticed, I'm not sure they made anything of it, but I glanced down at my belly where I was impaled at Briggs.

Clearly, I couldn't blame Al for using his own soul – just using it lightly and shortening his life frivolously.

I guess he must have understood how important a soul was to life too. "But wouldn't using our own soul shorten our lives?" he asked.

He had my full attention. My eyes stayed on Al, who was wearing clothing that was worn and faded, but still just normal black slacks and a white shirt instead of robes. With things as they were at that moment, Al seemed almost like the alchemical theorist of a brother that I thought I'd lost to magic, even as he said, "We wizards often end up living longer than other humans. We don't shorten our lives by using magic, and we don't shorten the lives of those around us either. We're not exchanging bits of our soul for magical results."

Looks like Al had finished some of his research, at least in response to my letter about the philosopher's stone. At some point during his explanation, a smile had slid onto my face. "I'm glad to know you've gotten that far at least."

I freed the wizards from the floor and got back on the soft mattress. Feeling better after the fight, I actually told Al how I felt toward him, even if I did feel awkward doing it. I made sure to tell him I was proud of him for the pamphlet I'd found in Diagon Alley.

Now that it was impossible to keep him out of danger by making him think I hated him, I wanted to be sure he knew I loved him.

"Ed?" Al's tone was considerably less angry. It was almost as gentle again as when I'd first woken up in the girly guest room.

Smiling at Al, I gave him another reason to stay in England: combating local misinformation with his past research. "You should regain the strength to do that one soon enough once I get you your body back. And I'll do that s soon as I have the strength for such large scale alchemy."

Al frowned. "What are you going to trade?"

"Something I understand better than you understand magic." I rolled onto my uninjured side, toward the wall, so I wouldn't have to face my brother. "Let me rest."

Al was quiet, but I didn't hear him leave as I drifted off either.

* * *

The next few days are a blur in my memory. I was asleep much of the time, but I do remember being woken for meals and wound care.

Whoever was making the meals was a decent cook – I kept getting mouth-watering warm bowls of perfectly seasoned soups and stews. I even got my favorite, beef stew, tasting better than it ever had since Mom was around to make it.

The medicines weren't so pleasant. Besides the stinging one the wizards put on my still-delicate side whenever they changed my bandages, there was one I had to drink.

It was bitter and slimy. I think I'd have preferred milk to that stuff.

Nothing eventful happened until the day Al brought me a bowl of stew and admitted to reading my alchemy notes. He was just worried about me and I knew it.

I ended up telling Al that I'm trading my Gate and assured him I'd be okay without it. I also explained the basics of the plan to him.

He was still worried. Gone were the days when I could reassure my brother with just confidence and logic, but at least I got him to promise to stay in England by agreeing to let him send me home with defensive, presumably magic, items.

After that, I tried to reassure him the way I'd used to one more time, complete with physical contact and even a promise to get him a cat when he came home. But it looked like we really had drifted apart during the ears I'd thought he'd left me for magic and he'd thought I'd abandoned him, and the aftermath of our recent fist fight wasn't enough to make up for all that.

* * *

The beginning of May was a crucial step in rebuilding our relationship – at my recovery speed, we'd aimed for May 2nd for me to trade my alchemy for his body.

The night of May 1st, I was feeling great. My wounds were all healed up and I could move around freely.

Al came and found me in the guest bedroom, where I'd made sure what little I had with me was packed and that my battered alchemy journal was ready to go in case I needed to repair the array set up in the woods.

We talked into the night. We talked alchemy and swapped stories of the last few years. We talked that we learned that Al's school was under attack.

Al insisted on going, despite his twin friends telling him to stay home. He, still in normal clothes, slacks and a sweater, ran to grab something from one of the rooms. It was a wooden wand, the first indication I'd actually seen all trip that yes, my baby brother was one of the wizards.

He ran past me into the living room, which was a cozy space with an old lady's style of furniture and a rug covering its wooden floor. At the edge of the living room was a fireplace with a brick mantle.

On the mantle was a jar of some sort of green powder that Al reached for.

I went up behind my brother. "Al? If you're going to help, then so am I. Just like old times."

And Al let me step into his new world with him to come fight. We somehow used the green powder and the fireplace to get to Al's school, where the surprises didn't stop: somehow, the wizards had gotten painting to move and staircases to float through the air by themselves.

Al and I went down through the dimly-lit stone hallways of what turned out to be a castle to a large room with several long tables to wait for the fighting to begin.

I'm sure Al could give you a better description of the battle as he was far more familiar with magic than I was at the time and therefore better understood what was going on, but I do know that there were spells of every color flying off everywhere to do who-knows-what and that my alchemy was useful enough to help me fight against it.

Al and I were briefly separated, but we were back to fighting side-by-side and back-to-back again.

People died during that battle. I watched one of the twins that were sheltering Al die when some spell caused an explosion, and there was nothing I could do. Covered in dust, I could only inform Al of it when I saw him again.

It was a long battle, and I was tired enough at the end that I had to sleep for several hours afterward.

* * *

In the late afternoon, I led Al out into the woods. Even he was looking tired and sluggish after the battle with his head drooping and his feet trudging along, and I knew it would have to have been from seeing his school and his friends attacked like that. From having to see people die.

Al brought that walnut stick that allows him to do his magic with him, and I didn't say anything about it as we walked through the woods, occasionally trampling through the bushes or pushing tree branches out of our way.

I checked on the array when we had reached it and I found several things I needed to clean up – washed-out lines and animal tracks.

I got down in the grass and started rebuilding the array. While I was smoothing out some deer tracks, Al knelt down next to me. "Brother are you sure this is alright?"

I voiced my frustration with my brother's life choices one last time. "I'm confident in my theory, but you're right. You should at least check everything over before we step foot in this thing. Things shouldn't just work by putting your blind trust in them."

"Are you talking about magic?"

I completed the array for the second time, weighing my words in my mind. Closing my eyes for a moment, I said, "I just don't want you to get hurt because you didn't understand the consequences. We've come to enough harm that way."

It was the truth. I was done being so mad at Al for changing philosophies on me that I considered him a traitor, so all that remained was concern. Magic didn't cost him his body, his mind, or his soul, so what was the exchange? Fueling magic with emotions still made no sense to me.

I felt a hand get placed on my left shoulder, a hand as warm as though it had been a human hand. Al must have been trying to comfort me.

"I may not understand how everything works," he said, "but even in magic, I don't just put my blind trust in things. I had to learn for myself that magic does work without serious consequences, and even now, I want to learn how it works where I can."

I rolled my eyes. Hadn't Al written to tell me that he'd given up on explaining it?

Al seemed to remember that letter too. He brought it up. "What I meant back then was that I don't think we have enough time in one lifetime to figure out how everything works. I never meant that there were things with no explanation."

My younger brother's weight shifted against me, his arm coming forward to touch my back.

I gazed at what I could see of the sky through the trees' jutting branches. How much was Al still trying to explain? And how much was he just trusting in like it was some sort of god?

I looked over my shoulder at Al's face. His lips were pressed together and his eyes were studying me.

Or at least they were when I first turned my head. When Al noticed me looking at him, his expression changed: he gave me his puppy dog eyes.

What did he want from me? Acceptance? Approval?

I'd give him what I could. "I really hope so. It's just that you trust magic so much more than I do."

He smiled, got up, and checked my array. It passed, but Al had another concern. "In order for mankind to gain anything," he said, "something of equal value must be sacrificed first. Wouldn't you have to give up your Gate before you could get me back? How are we going to get out?"

I winced. Maybe Al remembered Equivalent Exchange better than I'd thought.

Luckily, I had thought of this too. Ever since the day that I'd met with the colonel and my rotten father to talk about Al's situation in England, I'd been thinking about it. I had an answer, and idea I got from my dad telling the story of Xerxes.

My rotten father said he'd give his whole life to undo his naive mistakes. So would I, but I didn't think I had to give all of it to let myself and Al out from the Gate before I lost my alchemy. However, Al wouldn't be happy to hear about that. "There is something else I'm trading in exchange for the timing."

"What are you planning to trade?"

I stood up and carefully walked to the center of the array, not answering Al.

Al kept trying to get me to tell him what I was trading, even threatening not to come to the Gate to get his body back with his body language.

I didn't think he would come if he knew.

I looked Al in the eyes. "Please, trust me."

After a moment's pause, Al nodded. When he came into the circle with me, I took his arm and activated the array. The Gate's gray eye opened and its black hands came and took us together.

We ended up in the white void in front of my large stony Gate of Truth.

"Back again, Mr. Alchemist?" Truth's many voices came from behind us. "And I see you brought your brother with you."

I turned around, facing the white silhouette face-on. "We came to get Al's body back."

Truth supposed I'd come to trade my life for Al. He was close.

I chuckled, waving my automail hand behind me, toward my Gate. "This ought to be enough, right? And I'll let you have a portion of my life force if you let me and Al out before you take it."

As expected, Al didn't like my proposed trade. I reassured him a bit before dealing with Truth.

The being tried to tempt me away from the deal before he just laughed at me and said I was on the right track.

With my only chance to pull off something as important as this, I didn't want to hear that I was only on the right track. "You mean you refuse?"

"I can only take payments in advance. I can't take your Gate after you leave, even if you give me part of your soul."

"What? But you didn't take my leg until after you'd give me all that knowledge!"

Truth shook his head. "No, little alchemist, it was all an illusion. You never made it to this realm the first time around. Your brother pulled you out, remember?"

It was my turn to shake my head. "But you told me that you couldn't let me see more because I hadn't payed for what I'd already seen."

"You remember having a chat with me and being released, but how could I release you if your brother had already lost his body pulling you out?" Truth grinned that big creepy grin of his. "You lost your leg and I dumped that information in your head. That place where we chatted was your mind, and how is it my fault if you misinterpreted the price I mentioned that you hadn't paid to mean the leg that you were about to realize you'd lost?"

"But you…." I had more I wanted to say, but my brother interrupted.

"Is there another way out of this realm?" he asked.

I stared at Al. Another way? The only exit I'd seen anywhere was my personal Gate. Who else could connect to my Truth?

"Not normally," said Truth, "but your idea would certainly work."

Truth was now talking to me. "What do you say, Mr. Alchemist: your Gate for your brother, and your brother gets you out?"

I looked at the human-looking suit of armor currently serving as Al's body. He had his puppy dog eyes on again.

"Trust me?" he asked. He held up his wand. "I haven't done it before, but I think I can pull it off."

I wanted to ask how exactly he'd be getting us out of there, but without my Gate, his magic would be the only thing that could get us out.

So I made the deal with Truth. He took my Gate first and then swapped out Al's armor for his real body. Al stumbled and fell, dropping his wand.

I caught Al and held his weight with my human arm alone. I stooped down just enough to pick his wand up with my automail.

There was as little sensation in my prosthetic limb that was handling Al's wand as I'd had in handling his teacher's. There was no unexplained feeling like Al had experienced.

Maybe it meant that I lacked the capability to fully understand what Al does, but I still had the choice to trust my brother or not. And I knew now that Al was no traitor. In handing him his wand, I chose to believe it too.

When Al and I left, it was by Al doing something to my clothes that made them yank us away, spinning, through some sort of vortex that dumped us on the forest floor.

I felt nauseous. I felt dizzy. I felt every minor injury I'd gotten at the battle at Al's school as I lay in the soft grass, but I'd gotten my brother his body back and survived.

By the time I collected myself enough to check on Al, he was unconscious. I guess his vortex-travel must have been too rough on his weak body, but his vitals were alright.

I took off my favorite red jacket and placed it on top of Al's emaciated form to carry him back to the house. I made sure to bring his wand with us too.


	10. A New Study

**Finished! I definitely don't like pantsing anymore. It wasn't as fun to write, and I'm not nearly as happy about how it turned out. Still, it was an interesting experience.**

* * *

A New Study

The wizards changed out the sheets in the guest bedroom bed and tucked Al in it. "This is his real body?" asked the surviving twin, George, I think.

I nodded, hanging my head. "Yeah. It's been trapped at the Gate for years." I gazed at my brother's too-thin face and the small bulge Al made in the covers. "I wish I could stay to see him recover."

Silence lingered in the room moments longer. "You know, he got you some things to help you in your country's war. Why don't I show you how to use them?"

But, shaking my head, I knelt down on the floor. "I want to make sure Al's taken care of first."

"The hospitals should be safe enough soon. I'll see what I can do to get him a room."

I smiled and insisted on paying. It was my little brother we were talking about here, and George had done enough for him already. "His school should be safe enough by the time he recovers with that Lord Noseless guy gone, right? I think it would be good for him to keep going when he's up for it."

I still didn't know if I could believe that anything could be as easy and costless as magic, not after what the failed human transmutation had cost us, but there had been a time after the accident when I didn't believe something as good as hope could exist again either.

Magic was my brother's hope that he could do something like the alchemy he loved, and Granny was right when she told me that I should let my brother explore the phenomenon called magic, the unknown power that he could actually use, back on the day that Al's teacher first told us that he's a wizard.

I stood up and met George's eyes. "I don't know when I'll be able to write again, but if I'm alive after everything, I'll be sure to tell him when it's safe to come home for breaks and everything again. Should be pretty soon."

The surviving twin took me downstairs, and ignoring the loud old hag who apparently owned the house, took me into a study with wooden furniture and magicked the door shut. He summoned a small box from inside a drawer in the writing desk and showed me the clothing and powders that didn't look like they all fit inside.

I had no luck in figuring out how it could all fit in a box as large as a pocket-sized book, but at least the clothing wasn't too weird: there were just hats and socks and stuff, no robes. And it was all red or black too, my colors.

The box was small enough that I was able to bring it back to Amestris, hiding curled up as small as I could inside an oversized packaged addressed to the colonel, with only microscopic air holes transmuted into the box to allow me to breathe.

The contents came in very useful months later on the Promised Day: some powder Al hooked up for me made it pitch-black enough to prevent Pride's shadows from forming and the red hat turned me into a human chameleon as long as I kept it on. The socks just bit my toes when I put them on, another one of George's jokes I guess.

* * *

I could barely believe how many of us made it out alive, but none of the people I knew well were killed. Still, the colonel lost his sight when he was forced to open his Gate to become the fourth sacrifice, and Armstrong lost an arm much the same way. I was injured too, and all of us were hospitalized.

In the following weeks, I turned in my pocket watch, and Mustang was able to have my former hostages sent for. Granny and Winry arrived just in time to help me bury my dad.

My old man went out, sitting by Mom's grave. It was a sunny day, and he passed with a smile on his face. He actually looked the part of an old man when he went, one whose time to die should already have been long past.

We buried him next to Mom. We covered his freshly-dug grave with flowers and did the same for Mom's older grave, arranging the flowers all in the shape of a heart.

I didn't know what to feel as I looked at the graves, but Winry stayed with me to support me. "Mom died waiting for him to come back to her. I guess he finally did."

Winry and I stood there for awhile. The shadows grew longer and the sun started to sink before she took my hand. "Come get dinner. It's been a long day."

* * *

Granny and Winry put me up for a couple of days, trying to let me mourn or something I guess. In that time, I helped them clean the dust of their house and fix things up a bit after their absence. It was when I was covered in black soot in the Rockbells' chimney that Granny broached the subject of what I was going to do now that I'd gotten Al's body back, had quit the military, and no longer had my alchemy.

"I'm going to rebuild the house. Al's going to want someplace to come home to."

"By yourself?" I couldn't see Granny's face while looking up at the blackened bricks, but she sounded incredulous.

"I'll manage."

Granny had a better idea. "A British engineering professor went through Rush Valley shortly before that commanding officer of yours had us shooed off to France to learn about automail. He was impressed by Winry's work and talked to her about entering his university as an international student. I'm sure you could get in as an international student too and live closer to your brother and his school. I'd love to see the two of you be close again."

I considered it. Living close to Al's school would mean something if they allowed visitors, but it wasn't like I wouldn't see him during breaks.

"He cares about people here. It's been years since he's been home in Amestris."

"But do you really think he'd stay here? There aren't many of his type in this country." Granny said no more and went off, her footsteps a quiet pitter-patter. But when I'd finished cleaning the chimney, I came out and saw that she'd left a thin stack of papers behind. There were pictures of imposing buildings with green lawns, labelled with the names of universities throughout the British Isles. Each of the ones Granny left me at least mentioned some sort of science program in the brochure.

I took them with me when I washed off and they ultimately ended up by the guest bed. "Other sciences, huh?" I asked myself that night as I sat on the bed's red comforter, looking toward the brochures. "Well, I guess if I can't do alchemy anymore, studying something similar might not be so bad."

Picking up the brochures, I examined them more carefully. But what to study?

One of the programs caught my eye: biochemistry. "Al and I studied this when we were trying to get Mom back." But that wasn't all it was good for, was it? "Al's trying to figure out what the difference is between a wizard's Gate and a normal person's Gate is anyway. We don't know of a physical part of the body associated with it. What if...?"

I slept fairly well that night. I don't think my nightmares will ever leave me for good, but they didn't really bother me that night. Instead, I was able to sleep on where to go from there and the option Granny gave me.

So I started applying for English language school in Britain and was accepted to one in London. I went to London in late August. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to see Al off to his school as I was getting an apartment and all set for my own classes. It would just have to be a surprise for Al and his Christmas break.

That December, Granny and Winry came to visit. The three of us picked Al up from Platform 9¾, the previously solid barrier having been opened with the platform that day. It was weird walking through a solid wall without even being able to feel any cold or rough stone texture, but it was even weirder seeing Al with his wizarding stuff again – with his trunk and (when had he gotten one?) his owl.

We'd called a taxi to help us get around London with none of us being able to drive, even on Amestrain roads. The cabbie gave Al's owl a funny look, but I brushed it off with an explanation of "my brother really likes birds."

What Granny had said about Al not staying in Amestris niggled at my mind. "What are your plans after Hogwarts, Al? There's not much of a wizarding world back in Amestris – that's why you had to travel all the way out here for school. You're probably staying in England, right?"

He was. Apparently he wasn't allowed to use his magic to help normal people, or at least not openly, and he wanted to fix that.

I'd noticed that about the wizarding world in Amestris – they weren't open about their magic at all. In fact, every time I encountered something magical, be it werewolves, wizards, or something else, they wiped the memory of everyone around me. It wasn't like alchemy at all.

It looked like not only did my brother remember the laws of alchemy, but he still had the motto "be thou for the people" written on his heart. He'd changed, yes, but he hadn't betrayed me – he hadn't even really betrayed our lifestyle.

I didn't say anything to Al the rest of the day until the two of us were getting into the bunk beds in our small apartment. "Al, it really is great having you back. Even if you're different now."

We had a little chat, a line or two back and forth really, just clearing the air a bit. The last thing Al said was "You've always been trying to do what's best for me. I can appreciate that."

"Yeah," I said, a smile breaking over my face as I stared at the light popcorn on the ceiling. "Good night, Al." Once I heard him lightly snoring, I added, "You really don't hate me, do you? For anything."

From the next day onward, we were research partners again, and I defended what my brother thought about magic.


End file.
